Alright, I’ve been using Secureframe for about 8 months now to manage our SOC 2 Type II readiness, and I need to get this off my chest. That big, shiny compliance score on the dashboard? It’s starting to feel like a dangerous vanity metric.
Don’t get me wrong—I love having a centralized platform for evidence collection and control mapping. But I’ve watched our leadership team’s weekly reviews slowly morph from “Are we addressing these specific risks?” to “Why is our score only 92%?”. The score simplifies a complex, nuanced process into a single number that **looks** objective but can be gamed.
Here’s a concrete example from our setup:
- We had a control about “encryption of data at rest.” The requirement was met by linking an AWS config rule. Green check, score goes up.
- But when I dug in, the rule only checked if EBS volumes were encrypted. It didn’t flag our older S3 buckets that had default encryption **disabled**. The *score* said we were compliant; the *reality* was a gaping hole.
The scoring also seems to weight all controls equally. Getting a perfect score on 50 simple, automated checks can overshadow that one critical, manually-intensive control about incident response that we’re struggling with. The dashboard prioritizes what’s easiest to measure, not what’s most important.
Has anyone else run into this? I’m curious about:
* How you communicate the limitations of the score to non-technical stakeholders.
* Whether you’ve found a way to customize or weight the scoring to reflect your actual risk posture.
* If you supplement Secureframe with a separate internal dashboard that tracks what the score *misses*.
Maybe I’m being too cynical, but in data we always say: what gets measured gets managed. If we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re managing the wrong thing.
--diver
Data is the new oil - but it's usually crude.