The Foundation of Trust: Why Your On-Call Platform is the Heart of SOC 2 Security and Availability

For modern SaaS and technology platforms, SOC 2 compliance is a gamechanger for building trust. Besides having the ISO 27001, it’s an audit framework that proves to your customers and partners that you are a trustworthy custodian of their data.

Compared to ISO 27001, which is a specification for an Information Security Management System (ISMS), SOC 2 is a report on the effectiveness of controls related to five Trust Services Criteria (TSC), of which two are deeply tied to your operations: Security (the mandatory criteria) and Availability.

Diving deeper into the SOC-II rabbit hole, your incident management and on-call platform, e.g. All Quiet, is not just a tool for waking people up when s*** hits the fan. It is the primary evidence generator for these two critical SOC 2 criteria.

1. Security (Common Criteria: CC)

The Security criteria, or Common Criteria (CC), is mandatory for every SOC 2 report. It ensures your systems are protected against unauthorized access and disclosure. All Quiet helps you prove the operational effectiveness of several key CC controls, acting as a crucial security layer itself.

Establishing a reliable incident management process is essential for CC7.1 and CC7.2, which govern system monitoring, detection, and incident response. Your incident response platform, e.g. All Quiet, immediately routes and logs all alerts, providing the primary operational evidence that your system for detecting and responding to security events is operating continuously and as described in your control documentation. This automated and timely response is the first line of defense proving the effectiveness of your security controls.

Diving deeper into CC8.1, which demands that system changes and system components are authorized and documented. When an incident occurs, the response itself constitutes an operational change to the environment (e.g., executing a runbook, patching, or restoring a service). Every action taken in response to an alert, e.g. acknowledgment, status updates, escalation or documented fixes, are logged automatically in an immutable incident timeline. This detailed Audit Log & Incident Timeline ensures that all critical actions taken during a security incident are fully traceable and defensible to an auditor, proving your change control process extends into the high-stakes world of live incident response.

2. Availability (A)

For any service provider where system uptime is a contractual promise (via an SLA), the Availability criteria is crucial. This proves the system is accessible for operation and use as committed.

Your incident management platform, e.g. All Quiet, plays a key role in demonstrating compliance with the Availability criteria, starting with A1.2, which requires implementing and testing a disaster recovery plan. The platform demonstrates alerting resilience through its use of multi-channel alerting, failover alerting (SMS, voice call, push notification). This shows the auditor that your critical incident response system itself is redundant and highly available, a necessary component of your overall disaster recovery strategy.

Compliance also hinges on A1.3, the ability to monitor capacity and performance. All Quiet directly addresses this with its reporting features. Performance Metrics like Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) prove that your incident process is fast, efficient, and meeting documented performance thresholds. Your direct, quantitative measurement of operational availability.

Lastly, for A1.4, regarding communicating system status to users, All Quiet’s built-in, real-time Status Pages provide a formal, controlled method for communicating status updates externally. This transparent and immediate external communication fulfills the requirement for proper stakeholder management during service interruptions. To ensure your incident communication strategy is top of the game, All Quiet’s Status Pages can be configured through an IP restriction.

Our Key Takeaway: SOC 2 isn't about having beautiful policies; it's about providing operating evidence. By centralizing your incident response in All Quiet, you automatically generate the timestamped, detailed log files, metric reports, and policy enforcement evidence that a SOC 2 auditor will demand to prove your trustworthiness.