Governance, Risk & Compliance
A SOC 2 compliance consultant in India is usually hired because a customer asked for the report and the deal is waiting. Worth knowing before you start: SOC 2 is not a certification. It is an attestation report in which a licensed CPA firm gives an opinion on whether your controls are suitably designed and, in a Type II, whether they operated effectively over a period.
That distinction shapes everything. There is no fixed control list. You define your own controls against the Trust Services Criteria you select, and the auditor tests what you claimed. Choosing which criteria apply, and writing controls you can actually evidence every day for a year, is where the programme is won or lost.
We scope it honestly, close the gaps, and get the evidence collection running before the observation window opens, because a Type II is only as good as the records from the period it covers. Where you also need ISO 27001:2022, the control sets overlap heavily and should be built once.
Why you need it
01 / 06For a SaaS or service business selling into North American enterprises, the report is requested early and often decides whether a procurement process continues. It routinely removes weeks of bespoke security review.
Auditors qualify opinions and list exceptions, and customers read them. A report with material exceptions in the areas the customer cares about invites more scrutiny than having no report at all.
A Type II covers a period, typically three to twelve months. Access reviews that were skipped in month four and change tickets that were opened retrospectively both show up in testing. The system has to work every week, not before the audit.
The Security criterion overlaps substantially with ISO 27001:2022 Annex A and with most customer questionnaires, so one control programme can serve several obligations.
Instrument
02 / 06Each criterion with the question it actually asks and the evidence that answers it, plus where it overlaps what you are already doing.
What we deliver
03 / 06Which of the five Trust Services Criteria you actually need. Security is mandatory; Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy are each added only where a customer requires it or your service genuinely depends on it. Adding criteria you do not need is the most common way to make a SOC 2 twice as expensive as it should be.
Your current controls tested the way the auditor will test them, with the gaps documented and an honest view of whether you are ready for a Type I now, a Type II later, or neither yet.
Writing controls you can evidence: access provisioning and review, change management, vulnerability management, monitoring and alerting, incident response, vendor management, and the human resource controls auditors always sample.
The policy set the auditor expects, written to describe what you actually do. A policy that promises quarterly reviews you do not perform creates the exception; a policy that describes your real cadence does not.
Getting evidence collected automatically from the systems that generate it, before the observation window opens. Manual evidence assembly for a twelve-month Type II is where most teams lose a month of engineering time.
Introductions to licensed CPA firms and help comparing them properly, then management of the audit itself: evidence requests, sampling, auditor questions, and remediation of anything found before the opinion is issued.
How we run it
04 / 06Which systems and services the report covers and which Trust Services Criteria apply. We push back on scope creep here, because every additional criterion adds controls, evidence and audit cost for the life of the programme.
Weeks 1-2Testing current controls against the selected criteria the way an auditor will, producing a gap register with owners, effort and a realistic date for the observation window to open.
Weeks 2-5Closing the gaps: access control, monitoring, change management, incident response, vendor management and data protection, implemented so that operating them generates the evidence automatically.
Months 2-5The documentation set, aligned to what the controls actually do. Auditors test the gap between the policy and the practice, so the documentation is written last, from reality.
Months 3-5Running the auditor's tests ourselves before they do, sampling evidence from the observation window as it accumulates, and fixing failures while they are still cheap.
Month 5, then monthlyA licensed CPA firm conducts the examination: a point-in-time Type I, or a Type II covering the observation period. We manage the evidence requests and drive any findings to closure before the opinion is issued.
Months 6-12Key benefits
05 / 06A clean report covering the service your customer is buying answers most of an enterprise assessment, and it answers it the same way for every customer.
Because they were designed to generate evidence automatically, access reviews, change approvals and monitoring keep happening after the audit rather than resuming a month before the next one.
The Security criterion overlaps heavily with ISO 27001:2022 Annex A, so a mapped control set makes the second certification largely an exercise in re-presenting evidence you already collect.
Tools we use
06 / 06No “latest tech tools”. These are the ones your report will cite, alongside the manual work that a tool cannot do for you.
Framework
Evidence automation
Technical controls
Access and change
Mapping
Why Aphelion
SharedDarshap Nayak, formerly of KPMG, holds a master’s degree in cybersecurity and more than seven years in security operations. Jaimin Somani brings fifteen-plus years of academic and hands-on VAPT. Hemang Desai is an ICT network specialist from Australia. You will meet them, not a logo.
Meet the teamEvery finding arrives with the reproduction steps, the affected asset and the fix, ranked by what it actually reaches in your environment, not by a CVSS number copied from a scanner. You get the report and the raw output, not a summary of a summary.
See how we testAhmedabad and Sharjah, working the same methodology on the same tooling. Indian data-residency requirements and UAE delivery are both ordinary here, and the AphelioNYX AD Pen-Test module runs entirely inside your perimeter when regulation says it must.
The platformInvent a statistic to make a slide land. Publish your name as a client without written permission. Print an award badge nobody awarded. Founded in 2024. We say so, and we attribute experience to the people who have it.
Ask us anythingAcross the globe, and across eight industries. We name a client only with their written permission.
AphelioNYX is SOC 2, ISO and GDPR compliant; attestations are available on request under NDA. We would rather hand you the report than print a badge.
Questions
FAQNext door
RelatedA personalised walkthrough and a free readiness assessment against the frameworks you are actually being asked for. Pick a time that suits you, or write to us. We reply within one business day.