SOC 1

Report on Controls at a Service Organization Relevant to User Entities’ Internal Control over Financial Reporting (ICFR)

The primary aim of the reports that are generated with respect to the AT-C section 320- Internal Control Over Financial Reporting, is to meet the requirements of the entities that are present in the service based organization and the parties that will be involved in the audit (CPAs) that are dealing with the impact of the internal controls in the service based firms associated with financial statements of the user entities.

Within these reporting engagements, there are 2 types of reporting formats :

1. Type 2 – this report deals with the aspect of being clear and transparent in presenting the description of firm’s servicing system and the design suitability for managing the effectiveness of the controls that are deployed to meet the objectives at all times during the mentioned time frame.
2. Type 1 – this report provides information on the management’s understanding and detailed information on the processes in the organization along with the applicability of the controls designed to meet the listed objectives that are associated with the controls as per the mentioned date and time.

These reports will be available only to auditors, user entities and management teams of the service organization.

SOC 2

Report on Controls at a Service Organization Relevant to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality or Privacy

The primary objective of such reports is to reach the need of wide spectrum based users that would require complete information and also assurance on the controls that are deployed in a service based organization. and these controls will be pertaining to the security parameters like CIA and the organization uses this information to process the privacy and confidentiality of the data that is generated by these systems. And such reports can be used to :-

1. Understand the overall picture of the firm
2. Programs that deal with managing vendors and third party suppliers.
3. Organization related governance and risk management approaches.
4. Applicability with respect to regulations

As mentioned above there are also 2 report types. Type 2 report deals with providing a full description on the applicability of the controls and its operational effectiveness to the service based organization. And type 1 report provides information about the service organization and the usability of controls that are designed. And these reports are used in a limited fashion

SOC 3

Trust Services Report for Service Organizations

To make sure that the service organization based controls are able to meet the parameters like security, availability, confidentiality, integrity or privacy, these reports will aid the management in assuring with the requirements being met , without actually possessing any technical or procedural knowledge about the usage of SOC report. And as they are considered to be general use reports, SOC3 reports can be given away without any conditions.

SOC for Cyber Security

Now a days, many firms are under mere pressure to display the ability that they are fully equipped with measures to manage cyber security threats. And they also have deploy proper controls and processes in place that will support the organization to identify, react or respond and to resolve and mitigate any kind of unwanted events that might creep into the internet set up.

To deal with the necessity of the current cyber security based situation, AICPA has created a risk management that will work around the cybersecurity to inform and communicate proper information related to the strength and capabilities of their cyber security risk management programs. The designed framework is an important element that is associated with SOC- system and organization controls related to the cyber security initiative, using which the CPA provides a independent report to the concerned parties. This will be dealing with complete enterprise wide cyber security based risk evaluation program. This information can be very useful for executive committee, stakeholders, public investors and other important people in understanding the capabilities of the organization.