Question for people who’ve gone through SOC 2: what evidence actually helped during buyer security reviews?
I’m trying to understand the practical side of SOC 2 for early-stage SaaS teams.
From what I’m seeing, the painful part is not only “getting SOC 2 ready,” but also answering buyer security questionnaires repeatedly and collecting the same evidence from AWS/GitHub/policies again and again.
For people who have gone through SOC 2 or helped teams prepare:
What evidence/artifacts were actually useful before or during customer security reviews?
For example:
AWS IAM/MFA evidence
CloudTrail/logging proof
S3 encryption/public access checks
GitHub branch protection
PR review requirements
access review records
incident response policy
security questionnaire answers
PDF/security packet for buyers
change log showing security improvements over time
I’m not looking for legal/audit advice. I’m trying to understand what small SaaS teams should prioritize first when they’re not ready for a full compliance platform yet.
What would you say are the top 5 artifacts that actually matter?