A SOC 2 report is an independent auditor’s opinion on your company’s controls, so two things are permanently yours: the management assertion your leadership signs, and the decisions behind it — scope, risk acceptance, which trust services criteria to include. Everything between those decisions and the finished report is labor, and labor outsources: gap assessment, platform configuration, control remediation, policy drafting, evidence collection, and the back-and-forth with the audit firm.
In a managed engagement that split works out to your team making a handful of choices per quarter while the provider spends the hours. Your engineers still ship the occasional fix in product code, but the program management — the part that eats roadmaps — moves entirely.
Agency’s version, described on Managed Compliance Services, pairs a GRC platform (Vanta or Drata, at partner pricing) with compliance engineers who operate it: they stand up controls, remediate what monitoring surfaces, assemble the evidence package, schedule the independent audit firm, and sit in the fieldwork meetings. After the report lands, the same team keeps the program warm for year two and answers the security questionnaires the report attracts.
No. The CPA firm issuing your SOC 2 must be independent of whoever builds and operates the controls. Agency prepares you and coordinates fieldwork with independent firms — see audit partners — which keeps the opinion clean.
No. You need an executive sponsor to make decisions and engineers who can merge occasional changes; the function itself can be external from day one. That model is covered under outsourced compliance team.
