SOC 2 is mostly a documentation exercise about things good engineering teams already do: access control, change management, monitoring, incident response.
The trap is doing it manually. Screenshots of dashboards, spreadsheets of access reviews — that's how compliance becomes a full-time job.
Policies as code
We wrote every control as an automated check. Access reviews are a script that diffs IAM against the org chart. Change management evidence is generated from pull request metadata.
Our auditors got read-only dashboards instead of PDF exports. The audit itself took two weeks, and the controls keep verifying themselves every night.