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10/06/2026 12:43 am
TL;DR: SOC 2 certification still hinges on disciplined access control, documentation, and continuous monitoring, and Zluri’s guide stresses that self-audits, report selection, and scope discipline shape how quickly teams can prove compliance. Manual SaaS oversight remains brittle because offboarding, permissions, and audit evidence drift faster than review cycles can catch them.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance How to Get SOC 2 Certified in 2026
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should teams prepare access controls for a SOC 2 audit?
A: Teams should start with identity evidence, not the audit checklist.
Q: Why do SaaS environments make SOC 2 evidence harder to prove?
A: SaaS environments create multiple layers of access, including SSO, app-specific permissions, tokens, and delegated admin paths.
Q: What breaks when offboarding is only handled at the SSO layer?
A: Users may still retain app-level access, cached tokens, or permissions granted outside the central identity provider.
Practitioner guidance
- Map SOC 2 scope to identity boundaries List every system, SaaS app, admin role, and approval path that can generate audit evidence.
- Reconcile offboarding across SSO and app-level permissions Verify that user removal from SSO also removes application entitlements, residual tokens, and delegated access where the app keeps independent permission records.
- Build an evidence pack before the audit begins Collect sign-in logs, access logs, audit logs, and approval records for a sample set of users so the team can prove control operation without manual reconstruction.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step guidance on selecting the right SOC 2 trust criteria for your business model.
- Practical advice for choosing a CPA firm and preparing a pre-audit self-assessment.
- A detailed walkthrough of how the platform monitors access, logs, and deprovisioning during offboarding.
- Suggestions for combining SOC 2 with other compliance frameworks into a single checklist.
👉 Read Zluri’s guide to getting SOC 2 certified in 2026 →
SOC 2 certification in 2026: is your access governance ready?
Explore further
10/06/2026 9:54 pm
SOC 2 failures usually start as identity failures, not audit failures. The article treats certification as a process, but the real determinant is whether access can be evidenced, revoked, and reviewed consistently across the SaaS estate. When identity records are incomplete, the audit becomes an after-action explanation rather than a control demonstration. Practitioners should treat SOC 2 as a live access-governance test.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average organisation believes more than 1 in 5 of their non-human identities are insufficiently secured, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Two-thirds of enterprises have endured a successful cyberattack resulting from compromised non-human identities, with a quarter encountering multiple attacks.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when SOC 2 access evidence is incomplete?
A: Accountability usually sits with the team that owns identity governance, but the control outcome depends on shared ownership across IT, security, application owners, and SaaS administrators. If evidence is incomplete, the organisation has a control-design problem, not just a documentation problem.
👉 Read our full editorial: SOC 2 certification in 2026 depends on access governance
