<img src="https://ws.zoominfo.com/pixel/6169bf9791429100154fc0a2" width="1" height="1" style="display: none;">

We're blowing the whistle on Legacy PAM 🏀 Join us for an Access Madness Webinar on March 28

Search
Close icon
Search bar icon

Why We Built Comply | Free SOC 2 Policy Templates

StrongDM manages and audits access to infrastructure.
  • Role-based, attribute-based, & just-in-time access to infrastructure
  • Connect any person or service to any infrastructure, anywhere
  • Logging like you've never seen

SOC 2 can be a daunting process. Policies are subjective; auditors avoid providing much guidance; advice on the internet is incomplete or vague. We decided to create Comply, an open-source collection of SOC 2 policy templates that include best practices. We hope it reduces the stress of SOC 2 and points fellow startups in the right direction.

SOC 2 involves every team in the company -- including many which don’t report to you. You need to inventory your existing tools/infrastructure, research best practices, define policies and procedures for your teams, build consensus, and ultimately persuade every team to adopt them. The process is inevitably accompanied by acute time pressure: a major Q4 deal, an impending IPO, or a life-changing partnership that depends on successfully completing your audit.

Our team recently went through another SOC2 audit and decided this time around, we'd like to share some of our lessons learned (see "How to Stay SOC 2 Compliant"). We compiled these lessons in Comply and open-sourced all our work so fellow startups could easily adopt our work. I've been a part of security and compliance for other regimes as well (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR), and one thing all of these systems share is an unabiding love for documents!

As a developer, writing 80 pages of policies in Word docs reminded me just how much I love Git. We wanted policy documentation that felt more like code documentation and the workflow to be as convenient as the DevOps automation we use every day. In short, we wanted compliance to feel more like software.

We've published Comply (on Github) to establish a free, open-source foundation for a successful SOC 2 program.

Introducing Comply

Comply approaches SOC 2 from a developer’s perspective. Download a pre-authored library of 24 policies, edit directly in markdown, track versions with Github, assign compliance tasks through Jira and monitor progress in a unified dashboard. It's 100% free and open source.

SOC 2 Templates

Before starting SOC 2, we had a solid grasp of security, but security and compliance are two very different things. We found ourselves wishing for a baseline set of practices that definitively addressed SOC 2 without requiring an army of headcount dedicated to ongoing operations.

We compiled these best practices into our policy templates so that you can incorporate industry standards for today’s SaaS businesses simply by executing `comply init`. No need to be intimidated by a blank page or waste any time writing original policies from scratch. The templates have been reviewed and enhanced by security and compliance experts from Splunk, Yext, InVision, Braze, and others. Decades of experience, months of research, and writing are included with every Comply template.

Software

The Comply tool itself addresses two large and related topics:

  • Document management
  • Process workflow

Collaboration is a solved problem for programmers, and wherever possible, we rely on the tools and techniques of software development to enable your compliance program itself to feel like software.

Document Management

Our documentation pipeline produces professional, LaTeX-formatted PDFs (thanks, Pandoc!) from simple, legible markdown documents. Because documents are plaintext and stored in your existing source control system, diffs, merges, and revision history are implicit. Even in cases where policies are updated by less technical team members, using modern interfaces such as Github’s web UI with native markdown preview provides a WYSIWYG experience while retaining everything else we love about source control.

Each document also has a structured component, declaring exactly which aspects of the compliance standard it satisfies. Documents are cross-indexed with the compliance standard, allowing you to quickly point your auditor to the relevant document.

Process Workflow

Comply makes task management easy by integrating with your ticketing system (we’re launching with support for Github and JIRA). Assign a ticket to a collaborator and track the status in the Comply dashboard to instantly review which tasks are completed, in progress, or remain in the queue. Specify periodic tasks (policy reviews, OS patching, penetration tests, etc) and Comply will ensure a new ticket is created at the appropriate time. Like everything else in Comply, these schedules are plaintext (cron format) and are themselves committed to source control.

soc-2-software

SOC 2 Companion Course

Because the templates still need to be tailored to your business, we’ve provided some context and commentary on each in the form of a SOC 2 video course. We’ve digested the key concepts, common mistakes, and best practices.

We highly recommend you check it out as you kick off your policy authoring process. The course also provides a detailed walkthrough of the use of the Comply software, as well as some additional background on the origins of SOC 2, the role of the AICPA, and what you can expect come audit time.

Our Goal

We hope Comply helps you avoid much of the frustration we felt going through SOC2. The entire suite of tools and templates is open-sourced, so if you think of ways to improve, jump in and contribute!

We look forward to hearing your feedback and questions -- drop us a note in the official Comply Slack!

To learn more about how StrongDM helps companies with SOC 2 compliance, make sure to check out our SOC 2 Compliance Use Case.


About the Author

, Co-founder / CTO, originally developed empathy for Operations as a founding and pager-carrying member of many operations and data teams. As an Executive, he has led Engineering and Product in high-throughput and high-stakes e-Commerce, financial, and AI products. Justin is the original author of strongDM's core protocol-aware proxy technology. To contact Justin, visit him on Twitter.

StrongDM logo
💙 this post?
Then get all that StrongDM goodness, right in your inbox.

You May Also Like

ISO 27001 vs SOC 2
ISO 27001 vs. SOC 2: Understanding the Difference
SOC 2 and ISO 27001 both provide companies with strategic frameworks and standards to measure their security controls and systems against. But what’s the difference between SOC 2 vs. ISO 27001? In this article, we’ll provide an ISO 27001 and SOC 2 comparison, including what they are, what they have in common, which one is right for you, and how you can use these certifications to improve your overall cybersecurity posture.
Answering auditor questions in a SOC 2 review
Answering Auditors’ Questions in a SOC 2 Review
We recently completed our own SOC 2 audit, so we thought we’d review how we dogfooded our own product. We’ll share tips and tricks to make the audit process a little easier, whether you’re wrapping up your own or about to dive into the coming year’s audit. Here are the questions auditors asked us during our own SOC 2 audit and the commands and strongDM tooling we used to gather the evidence they requested.
SOC 2 dashboard
What Would My SOC 2 Dashboard Look Like?
As your organization pursues your SOC 2 certification, organization is critical. ‍You will be busy actively managing dozens of ongoing daily tasks, which can bury you in minutiae. But at the same time, you need to keep your high-level compliance goals in focus in order to successfully move your certification over the finish line.
SOC 2 Audit
Everything You Need to Know About SOC 2 Audits
Whether you’re looking to achieve SOC 2 compliance, or just want to learn more about it, your Googling is bound to lead you to a wealth of articles chock full of buzzwords and acronym soup. ‍In this post, we will provide a guide with definitions, links and resources to gain a solid understanding of everything you need to know about SOC 2 audits.
SOC 2 Policies Guide
A Definitive Guide to SOC 2 Policies
In this post, we will help you get started with a hierarchy to follow, as well as a summary of each individual SOC 2 policy.