SOC 2 Compliance Made Simple for SaaS & Data Platforms

-          How Data Aces Helps You Scale Securely

Learn why SOC 2 compliance is essential for growing companies and how Data Aces helps you achieve audit readiness, security, and trust faster. What Is SOC 2 Compilance? SOC 2 is a widely adopted security and compliance framework that evaluates how organizations protect customer data across security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy. It is commonly required by enterprise customers to validate that a service provider has appropriate controls in place to safeguard sensitive information. 

AICPA’s SOC 2 documentation is available at  https://www.aicpa.org/resources/article/soc-2-report 

What matters most for growing companies is how SOC 2 translates into practical, day-to-day security operations and how efficiently those controls can be implemented, maintained, and documented for customer security reviews and audits.  How Data Aces Helped an AI-powered sales engagement and business intelligence platform provider to achieve SOC 2 Compliance 

The client hosted its entire AI driven application for Legal Professionals and Law firms on a hybrid AWS – Hetzner Kubernetes Platform. This hybrid approach allowed the client to optimize its cost and to regain control over their cloud infrastructure by using cost efficient Hetzner cloud while retaining critical managed services on AWS. 

While this hybrid approach delivers significant cost and performance benefits, it also introduced a new challenge: achieving SOC 2 compliance on a largely self-managed, Kubernetes-based infrastructure. 

In this post, we’ll walk through two real, time-consuming SOC 2 challenges we faced during a production deployment and how Data Aces resolved them to help a leading enterprise client achieve SOC 2 compliance. 

 SOC 2 Readiness Evaluation  

The client in question provided a SaaS application to its customers.  After several successful onboarding of customers, they hit a wall with a large enterprise who refused to use any product that was not SOC 2 compliant. They engagad Data Aces to do a full evaluation, make the required changes and get the Soc 2 certification done.  

The image below shows the initial SOC 2 readiness state, with partial control implementation and several pending checks prior to remediation. 

  Before engaging with Data Aces, the organization’s SOC 2 compliance was only partially implemented, with about half of the required controls in place. While foundational policies existed, critical gaps remained in logging and monitoring and disaster recovery. Logs were generated but were not audit-grade, with inconsistent retention and limited evidence traceability. Disaster recovery plans existed only in documentation, with no proven backup restoration or validated RTO and RPO. As a result, SOC 2 readiness was fragmented and reactive, requiring focused technical remediation. 

The application runs on a hybrid cloud architecture:

• Kubernetes clusters on Hetzner Cloud for core application workloads

• Self-managed PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Redis for data and search services

• Longhorn for Kubernetes-native persistent storage and volume replication

• Velero for Kubernetes backup, restore, and disaster recovery workflows

• Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki for observability

• AWS S3 for durable object storage and backup retention

• AWS Lambda and SQS for event-driven and asynchronous processing

This setup offered flexibility and cost efficiency but required engineering effort to meet SOC 2 expectations. Issue 1: Disaster Recovery Existed but Was Never Proven

The Real-World Problem

Before Data Aces engagement, a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan existed primarily as documentation. In practice, it had never been comprehensively tested in a self-managed Kubernetes environment. During SOC 2 readiness reviews, auditors focused on operational realities rather than written plans, asking how quickly critical systems could be restored, how much data loss was acceptable, and when recovery had last been tested.

At that stage, backups were running and occasional restores were attempted, but recovery was never validated end to end. Most importantly, Recovery Time Objective (RTO) the maximum acceptable time to restore systems and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) the maximum acceptable data loss window was neither formally defined nor proven through testing. This gap is one of the most common reasons SOC 2 availability controls fail during audits.

How Data Aces Engineered a Proven Recovery Strategy

Data Aces treated disaster recovery as an engineering challenge, not a compliance checkbox. Before execution, recovery objectives, backup strategy, and testing cadence were clearly defined.

Recovery Objectives

To meet SOC 2 availability requirements, Data Aces defined clear and measurable recovery objectives based on business criticality.

• Core workloads (databases and critical APIs): Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes

• Supporting services: RTO of 4 hours and RPO of 1 hour

• Validation approach: Recovery targets were verified through scheduled restore testing rather than assumed from backup configurations
  

Backup and recovery strategy

• Combination of full and incremental backups

• Retention periods defined to allow recovery even if failures went undetected for days or weeks

• Kubernetes-native tooling used to avoid platform lock-in
  

Testing cadence

• Partial restore tests conducted monthly

• Full cluster disaster recovery simulations executed quarterly
  

Execution and Validation

Using Kubernetes-native tools such as Velero and Longhorn, Data Aces simulated real production failures, including node loss, namespace deletion, and persistent volume corruption. These exercises exposed real-world blockers, including encryption mismatches, IAM permission gaps, and service dependency ordering issues. Each issue was resolved, and recovery tests were repeated until results consistently met the defined RTO and RPO targets.

Result

Disaster recovery moved from an assumed capability to a proven one. Auditors were presented with timestamped restore logs, measured recovery timelines, and documented test outcomes. SOC 2 availability controls were satisfied using real operational evidence rather than untested assumptions.

Issue 2: Logging Existed but Was Not Audit-Grade

The Real-World Problem

Although logging was enabled, it was fragmented across AWS services, Kubernetes clusters, multiple regions, and environments. Logs existed, but retention periods were short, integrity was not guaranteed, and there was no single source of truth during incidents. From a SOC 2 perspective, this resulted in weak incident investigations, incomplete audit trails, and increased compliance risk.

How Data Aces Implemented Audit-Grade Observability

Data Aces established clear logging and monitoring standards aligned with SOC 2 requirements and implemented them consistently across the environment.

Logging standards

• Security and audit logs retained for 13+ months

• Critical production logs retained for 24 months

• Log integrity enforced using CloudTrail log file validation
  

Log collection and monitoring

• CloudTrail enabled across all AWS regions

• CloudWatch metrics captured at one-minute granularity

• VPC Flow Logs enabled for network-level visibility

• S3 server access logging activated

• Kubernetes logs centralized using Loki

• Time synchronization enforced across all systems
  

SOC 2 alignment

• Logs explicitly mapped to SOC 2 control requirements

• Incident response workflows tied directly to log evidence

Result

Every security and operational event became traceable, logs were tamper-evident and audit-ready, and incident response became faster and evidence-driven. Audit preparation time dropped significantly, as evidence was continuously available rather than collected manually at audit time.

The Outcome: SOC 2 Achieved Through Real Engineering Work

By focusing on the hardest, most time-consuming controls, Data Aces helped the client achieve SOC 2 compliance on a cost-optimized, Kubernetes-first platform. The result:

• Proven disaster recovery with measurable RTO and RPO

• Audit-grade logging across AWS and Hetzner

• Reduced audit friction and review cycles

• A reusable SOC 2 blueprint for future growth
  

This compliance dashboard demonstrates how Data Aces helped one of our leading clients in AI driven product space successfully achieve and maintain SOC 2 compliance. By implementing enterprise-grade security controls, strengthening cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure, enabling continuous monitoring, and automating audit evidence collection, Data Aces ensured that all SOC 2 requirements were fully met across security, availability, and operational governance. The consistently high compliance readiness score highlights how SOC 2 controls are continuously validated in real time, enabling ongoing audit readiness, reduced compliance risk, and a scalable foundation for secure growth.

Final Takeaway SOC 2 compliance is not achieved by enabling tools alone. It is earned by testing recovery, measuring time, and proving accountability.

This is where Data Aces delivers the most value turning complex, self-managed infrastructure into secure, auditable, and SOC 2-compliant platforms.