The following guide shares what we learned navigating SOC 2 from the inside. You’ll see why treating compliance as “just a technical exercise” is the first and most dangerous, miscalculation, and how building a security-first culture is the real foundation for long-term success.

Part 1: The illusion of a purely technical problem

When leadership teams kick off their SOC 2 preparation, there’s usually an initial focus on systems and processes:

1. What evidence do we need to collect?
2. What policies must be documented?
3. What tools should we implement for logging, monitoring, or access control?

These are all valid questions, but they imply that SOC 2 is a technical exercise. That’s the first major miscalculation.

SOC 2 isn’t just a test of your infrastructure. It’s an evaluation of how securely your organization operates, and that includes people. According to a report by Verizon, 74% of data breaches involve the human element, whether it’s error, misuse, or social engineering. 【source: Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report】. SOC 2 recognizes this, which is why the Trust Services Criteria include not just system operations, but also risk management, personnel onboarding, and access governance.

The Cultural Gap

Despite these requirements, companies often overlook the degree to which their team culture may clash with SOC 2 principles:

1. Engineers are focused on velocity, not documentation.
2. Product teams prioritize user experience, not secure defaults.
3. Customer-facing roles may perceive security reviews as bottlenecks to sales.

The outcome? Even with the right tools and frameworks in place, friction emerges when people don’t understand why security matters or how it should be integrated into their work. This friction can delay audits, create inconsistent evidence, and lead to non-conformities during assessments.

Part 2: Key cultural pain points (and how we navigated them)

Lack of cross-functional alignment

In our first SOC 2 readiness project, we made the mistake of keeping the initiative “within security and compliance.” The result? Weeks of delays waiting for evidence from engineering, stale documentation, and confusion around responsibilities.

What we learned: Every department plays a role in SOC 2. Success required creating a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) that clearly outlined ownership for every control.

What we did:

1. Created department-specific training for product, HR, engineering, and sales.
2. Held monthly cross-functional syncs to track progress and unblock dependencies.
3. Used collaborative tooling like TrustCloud to assign tasks and collect audit-ready evidence automatically.

Engineering pushback on “Security debt”

Engineers, by nature, thrive in systems that reward speed, iteration, and problem-solving. SOC 2, by contrast, rewards consistency, auditability, and control.

Initially, when we asked teams to implement controls like

1. MFA enforcement across all accounts
2. Logging changes in GitHub
3. Access reviews every quarter

…we were met with resistance. “This slows us down,” or “We’ll do it later” became common refrains.

Our turning point came when we reframed SOC 2 not as a restriction, but as an enabler of trust with customers, with partners, and even with regulators. We also brought engineers into the design of the control implementation so they could choose how to meet the requirements, giving them autonomy within constraints.

Documentation apathy

SOC 2 demands policies, dozens of them. Everything from onboarding checklists to incident response plans to change management procedures. But getting people to follow and update these documents regularly? That’s the real challenge.

In one company, we found that only 30% of managers had reviewed the acceptable use policy with their teams, even though they had “acknowledged” it in a system like Confluence.

To address this, we:

1. Integrated policy reviews into onboarding and quarterly refreshers.
2. Used simple quizzes post-review to ensure comprehension.
3. Adopted document management tools that tracked not just acknowledgments but engagement.