If you sell software or services to US customers, there's a good chance you'll eventually see three letters in a security questionnaire: SOC 2. For a UK or EU company that has invested in ISO 27001, or is thinking about it, this raises an obvious question — do you actually need SOC 2 as well, or is it just something buyers ask for out of habit?
This guide explains what SOC 2 really is, when it's genuinely worth pursuing, and how it lines up with the frameworks most UK and EU businesses already know.
What SOC 2 actually is
SOC 2 is a reporting standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Unlike ISO 27001, it is not a certification you pass or fail. Instead, an independent CPA firm examines your controls and produces an attestation report describing how well those controls meet a set of Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. Security is mandatory; the other four are optional depending on what matters to your customers.
There are two types of report. A Type I report assesses whether your controls are suitably designed at a single point in time. A Type II report assesses whether those controls operated effectively over a period, usually between three and twelve months. Most buyers who ask for SOC 2 want a Type II report, because it demonstrates sustained operation rather than a one-off snapshot.
When a UK or EU company actually needs it
SOC 2 is buyer-driven. You rarely need it for regulatory reasons in the UK or EU — you need it because a customer, or a prospect you want to close, has asked for it. In practice, that tends to happen when you sell software or data-processing services to mid-market or enterprise US companies, when you handle sensitive customer data in a SaaS product, or when a large deal is being held up by a procurement team that treats SOC 2 as a default requirement.
If your customers are entirely UK or EU based, ISO 27001 usually carries the same weight and is more widely recognised. Many organisations only pursue SOC 2 once a specific commercial opportunity makes the investment worthwhile.
How SOC 2 overlaps with ISO 27001
The good news is that the two frameworks share a great deal. Both are built around access control, change management, risk assessment, incident response, vendor management and monitoring. If you already run an ISO 27001-aligned information security management system, you have likely done 70 to 80 percent of the groundwork a SOC 2 examination requires.
The main differences are in emphasis. ISO 27001 places heavy weight on the management system itself — the risk treatment plan, the Statement of Applicability, management review and continual improvement. SOC 2 focuses more on evidence that specific controls operated consistently across the review period. That means SOC 2 is particularly demanding on evidence collection: you need to show that, for example, access reviews genuinely happened every quarter, not just that a policy says they should.
How SnapGRC helps
The hardest part of both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 is the ongoing evidence and control management, not the initial paperwork. SnapGRC lets you manage your controls, map a single control set across multiple frameworks so you're not duplicating work, and keep a continuous record of the evidence auditors and examiners want to see. If you're already using SnapGRC for ISO 27001, extending toward SOC 2 becomes a matter of layering on the additional Trust Services Criteria rather than starting again.
If SOC 2 is on your horizon, the most useful first step is to map what you already have against what an examiner will ask for. SnapGRC's control mapping makes that gap visible in hours rather than weeks.
