What are SOC 1 IT General Controls?
Understand the controls analyzed during a SOC 1 examination
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During a Readiness Assessment, the Auditwerx engagement team performs an “examination before the examination” on your process from beginning to end, explains what controls should be in place at each step, and evaluates whether your existing controls are in line with best practices. This assessment is helpful for preparing for a SOC assessment, and delivers a roadmap that your business can follow to a successful SOC examination.
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Without a Readiness Assessment, you may receive qualifications or exceptions in your final report. This could make your systems look less than trustworthy to current or future clients. A Readiness Assessment helps you avoid this headache, by making sure your systems have the proper controls in place before your examination.
We have helped countless organizations understand their current internal measures and improve upon them. During the readiness process, we assess the data flow of the services, identify controls, and provide a gap analysis of controls that may need implementation or improvement.
The key to completing a SOC report that will be useful to your clients is for the auditor to thoroughly understand your company’s array of service offered, and more importantly, those that are subject to the SOC examination. A SOC report should not be a one size fits all attestation. This phase of the readiness assessment narrows the focus of this process and increases efficiencies in our questions and testing, which means less time is required from your valuable staff.
Once the “in-scope” services are determined, the next step is to clarify both the processes and systems that support those services in order to establish the system boundaries and what is included in the SOC report. This step further narrows the focus and spotlights only those critical areas that are important to the in scope control environment while eliminating information not applicable to the scope of the report.
The next step is pinpointing key controls and, even more importantly, any control gaps. Control gaps consist of either controls that are not in-place (and should be) or controls that are ineffective. Identifying control gaps is critical because those gaps will need remediation. The “fix” could include a variety of things such as a new control or simply maintaining audit evidence like log files that are often purged but will need to be maintained over the reporting period.
“…Auditors were extremely courteous and patient with a great sense of urgency when it was needed the most. We would highly recommend Auditwerx services to organizations of all sizes and requirement complexities.”
IT general controls typically included, but not limited to, if applicable, in a SOC 1 report.
Controls around organization structure; policies and acknowledgements; employee background checks; management meetings/risk assessment.
Controls around physical access (understanding if servers are onsite or if third-party data centers are used).
Controls around logical access granted, modified, and removed, as well as privileged; passwords; websites; infrastructure (firewalls, SFTP, VPN, AV).
Controls around monitoring software and subservice organization monitoring, if applicable.
Controls around process for internally-developed software (authorization, testing, approval, segregation of duties, source code); patching; infrastructure changes.
Controls around the backup process (configurations, alerts, logs).
Your clients are looking for assurance in regards to 5 key aspects of your systems. A SOC report will offer assurance in the reliability of your systems and related controls.
Information and systems are protected against unauthorized access, unauthorized disclosure of information, and damage to systems.
Information and systems are available for operation and use to meet the entity’s objectives.
Information designated as confidential is protected to meet the entity’s objectives.
System processing is complete, valid, accurate, timely, and authorized to meet the entity’s objectives.
Personal information is collected, used, retained, disclosed, and disposed to meet the entity’s objectives.
Our handy guide, “Adding it Up: What Type of SOC Report Do I Need?” is a great starting point to determine what kind of SOC report best fits your company’s business and compliance needs.
When you’re ready to speak with an experienced team about your reporting needs, Auditwerx will be here for you.
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Understand the controls analyzed during a SOC 1 examination
Get a better understanding of the kinds of controls the could be examined during a SOC 1 report.
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