How Encryption Consulting Helps Organizations meet SOC 2 Compliance

Company Overview 

This organization is an international online retailer platform that sells all flagship products, electronics, and premium high-fashion apparel. Due to its uncompromised dedication towards customer satisfaction and customer experience (CX), it has become the primary choice and serves millions of consumers in the United States.   

The platform has more than 10,000 employees to cultivate innovation and deliver world-class products. It is an in-demand service provider whose capabilities extend from fast deliveries of all varieties of premium brands to personal shopping experiences. Known for its commitment to excellence, the company consistently works towards customer engagement with technology and streamlined operations. Being a trusted name within the retail industry, the company is continually expanding its base of customers and extending its service offerings to serve the varying market needs. In the pursuit of risk management and maintaining customer trust, it recognized the importance of protecting sensitive customer data, such as personal data, financial details, purchase history, login credentials, and biometric data. 

Challenges 

Achieving SOC 2 compliance was not just another item on the company’s checklist but a strategy with a complete evaluation of controls and processes installed.  

The organization encountered recurring certificate expirations, which led to critical service malfunctions, disrupted the operations of the organization, and caused damage to the company’s reputation. Consequently, this increased operational costs by 15% due to emergency mitigation and recovery efforts. Hence, the poor certificate management system made the organization vulnerable to data breaches, where sensitive customer data was exposed, which resulted in operational downtime.  

We assessed the central governance structure of this organization, which revealed that each of its systems and applications had its own encryption method and access control policies and, therefore, lacked a centralized governance structure. This approach made it nearly impossible to know who had access to certain sensitive information and to what level. 

Furthermore, the absence of a unified governance structure created gaps where risks remain invisible, leading to the weakening of the principles of monitoring controls and logical and physical access control. Therefore, the company faced great difficulty in ensuring continuous adherence to security protocols across different domains of its IT infrastructure, leading to inconsistencies in the implementation of encryption standards and access controls. 

Third-party vendors provided the firm with various services, such as payment processing and cloud storage, with access to sensitive customer data that included payment details, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and other confidential records. 

These vendors failed to comply with SOC 2 and had poor security settings, particularly in areas of data encryption, access control, and vulnerability management. They relied on obsolete methods, including Data Encryption Standard (DES) and weak key lengths for encryption processes, making sensitive data vulnerable to interception. Additionally, weak access management protocols would allow unauthorized access to essential systems, increasing the risk of data breaches. Furthermore, delays in patching known vulnerabilities left the retailer’s systems exposed to cyber threats. Any breach on the vendor’s side would compromise the retailer’s data security. 

The organization lacked efficient incident response plans, failing to ensure the principles of SOC 2 compliance, including security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy. The firm’s risk assessment processes were not strong enough to identify newly emerging threats and lacked accountability within the control environment to ensure their implementation and management of SOC 2 security measures. If it had developed such efficient incident response plans and strong risk assessment processes, it would have been efficient in identifying, mitigating, and responding to risks and breaches, thereby containing threats, minimizing damage, and providing reliable operations. 

Solution 

The project was particularly designed to ensure SOC 2 compliance, which is a part of our Consulting Services for Compliance. Encryption Consulting successfully delivered a customized audit report, strategy, and implementation roadmap to resolve the identified challenges. Our action plan’s primary agenda was to focus on all their core problems, including recognizing and assessing their entire cryptographic framework. 

Our approach to the audit was based on the principles of SOC 2 compliance, which focussed on five trust service criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. We began by focusing on the first principle, security, by assessing whether their systems were protected from unauthorized access. Then, for availability, we verified that their systems, products, and services were reliable and met service level agreements (SLA).  

The processing integrity principle was addressed by assessing whether the system was achieving its purpose of delivering accurate data at the intended place at the right time, i.e., emphasizing accuracy and availability. Then, for confidentiality, we assessed the confidentiality of data, i.e., by assessing that access to the organization’s data was restricted to authorized individuals, and strong encryption mechanisms were implemented. Also, we addressed the fifth principle, privacy, by ensuring that data handling was done in accordance with the organizational policies. This includes the system’s collection, disclosure, use, and disposal in accordance with the organizational policies. 

In order to address the critical issue of manual certificate management that led to downtimes of service, we recommended the use of a certificate management system. This automates the entire certificate lifecycle of the organization with real-time monitoring, notifications, and renewals to ensure continuous services and adherence to SOC 2 compliance while providing visibility into encryption mechanisms and controls, as well as misaligned security settings. 

Therefore, this automation of the entire lifecycle management of certificates was recommended by using Encryption Consulting’s CertSecure Manager, a whole vendor-neutral solution designed for enterprises. This certificate manager made it possible to implement proper access controls to sensitive data and reduce the risk of unauthorized access. With the potential for real-time monitoring and renewal processes as well as proactive notifications about expiration and revocation needs, it provided better operational resilience. Hence, the services to the client were uninterrupted while aligning it with SOC 2 compliance. 

The audit discovered an in-depth compliance gap that mentioned the areas where SOC 2 requirements were not met. Therefore, to deal with these identified vulnerabilities, we also provided a roadmap to their internal teams that focussed on enhancing their security posture and adhering to regulations. For continuous monitoring and reporting, advanced tools were recommended to proactively detect threats, generate logs, and provide capabilities to respond to incidents. These audit logs would provide the organization with an enhanced, transparent view of its infrastructure. 

Since the firm relied on third-party vendors and they are critical to client operations, we assessed all vendors’ security measures. The assessment included evaluating the vendor’s potential risks to the organization by examining their access controls, such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and incident response plans to assess how access to sensitive data is granted, monitored, and repealed.

However, the evaluations did reveal gaps in the vendors’ compliance with SOC 2 standards. These inconsistencies included using outdated encryption algorithms like DES, insufficient logging for unusual activities, and failure to implement proper access management, i.e., the management of user identities and their access right. To mitigate these risks, we offered a structured assessment framework for assessing vendor security measures. This included guidelines for establishing clear accountability, obligations, and periodic audits to ensure ongoing compliance. 

An efficient incident response plan is essential for SOC 2 compliance. Our audit findings uncovered several deficiencies within existing company protocols, particularly in threats regarding encryption and threat detection management. Recommendations were given in detail to improve the client’s incident response capability, including typical workflows for threat detection, response, and mitigation. 

Impact 

The customized roadmap helped the client deal with critical challenges and achieve an enhanced security framework. Their weaknesses in certificate lifecycle management caused major service downtimes for the client, which resulted in increased operational costs. Also, an insufficiency in complying with Service-Level Agreements (SLA) led to reduced customer trust. Our suggestion of automatic monitoring and renewal processes kept their platform running smoothly for customers, resulting in a 30% reduction in service interruptions, providing uninterrupted operations. 

The detailed compliance gap analysis provided the client with a clear, prioritized action plan, focussing on areas such as encryption, access control, vulnerability management, and incident response. Enhancing encryption mechanisms to protect sensitive data, strong access control measures to prevent unauthorized access, proactive vulnerability management to counter weaknesses in systems, and strengthening incident response mechanisms to efficiently and effectively detect and mitigate threats were the foundation of the action plan.

Our recommendation to incorporate a certificate manager in their environment made them save time and resources and, thus, speed up their way to achieving SOC 2 compliance. Furthermore, the audit strengthened their incident response plans to proactively identify any possible threats and mitigate them further, reducing risks and maintaining a higher level of integrity in their systems. 

The organization established future-proof security measures, such as scalable encryption frameworks, advanced access controls, and proactive threat detection, which prepares it well for the evolving cybersecurity challenges. The compliance efforts improved the organization’s security posture significantly, with better data protection, stronger authentication protocols, and better overall risk management. The audit also resulted in key cryptographic changes, including a shift to stronger encryption algorithms, improvements to secure key management practices, and the setting of stronger cryptography standards to ensure that sensitive data remains safe. Thus, these improvements helped strengthen the organization’s defense against any threats, as well as ensured that it would comply with regulations and prepare for future threats. 

Our recommendation of vendor-related risk management solutions provided to the client allowed them to obtain better control over their third-party relations. Vendor practices were aligned with SOC 2 standards; this minimized risks in the client supply chain and kept confidential information safe while cultivating accountability among partners. Most importantly, SOC 2 compliance for our client transformed its business.  

Conclusion 

Achieving compliance with SOC 2 is far more than a compliance milestone; it is the primary building block of trust, operational excellence, and competitive advantage in today’s data-driven marketplace. Our audit and support services have empowered our clients to confidently address their compliance challenges, protect operations, and improve their relationships with clients through significant personalized approaches. It will facilitate reducing service interruptions, enhancing security monitoring, and aligning vendor practices to SOC 2 standards, thus achieving compliance and creating an absolute foundation for growth and success. It made the firm a more trusted company and positioned it as an online retailer that could be trusted and relied upon. 

At Encryption Consulting, we provide businesses with expert guidance and practical solutions that help them navigate the complexities of compliance and security.