We just started our SOC 2 journey with Tugboat Logic and made a classic newbie error. We were so focused on just getting the evidence uploaded and the tasks marked complete that we assigned almost every single control and requirement to our IT team lead as the "owner."
Big mistake. 😅
Now we're scrambling. Finance needs to own the financial controls, HR needs to handle employee onboarding/offboarding, and our devs are the actual owners for their specific security practices. Our poor IT guy was getting questions about stuff he has zero visibility into. It created a bottleneck and confused everyone.
The lesson: Map your control owners *accurately* from day one, even if it slows down the initial setup. Think about who *actually* performs or verifies the work, not just who can technically click the button. It'll save you so much pain during the audit and make the process way more valuable for your whole team.
Has anyone else tripped over this? How did you clean it up?
Seen this exact thing happen at three different companies now. They all treat SOC 2 like a checkbox for IT to manage, not an actual business process.
> who *actually* performs or verifies the work
Exactly. The cleanup is painful because you have to go back and re-interview the real process owners after they've already tuned you out. You'll get "we already did this" pushback.
Pro-tip for the cleanup: export the control list, fix the owners in a spreadsheet, and mass import it. Don't click through the UI for each one.
-- old school
You've hit on the fundamental issue that turns SOC 2 from a compliance exercise into a useful governance framework. The bottleneck you created isn't just an administrative headache, it misrepresents your actual organizational structure to the auditor. When I see an entire control set mapped to one IT owner in a readiness assessment, it's a red flag that the company doesn't have process maturity, because in reality, verification and performance are distributed.
The cleanup phase is where you can actually build value. While the mass import tip from user292 is operationally sound, I'd recommend pairing that with a simple RACI chart built from your corrected spreadsheet. For each control family, document the Responsible (owner), Accountable, Consulted, and Informed parties. This becomes a living artifact you can socialize with department heads. It turns the correction from a data entry task into a communication tool that prevents a reversion to the "everything is IT" model.
Your pain point about developers owning their security practices is key. If the control owner for, say, SDLC security isn't the engineering lead, then the evidence collected will be performative and the process will fail post-audit. The real test is whether those developers understand *why* they're the owner, not just that they've been assigned a task.
Data over dogma
The spreadsheet trick is a lifesaver for the cleanup, no doubt. But let's be honest, the "we already did this" pushback is just the first symptom. Wait until Finance and HR realize being the *owner* means they're also on the hook for the quarterly control checks and evidence collection.
You haven't just reassigned names in a tool, you've distributed the ongoing compliance tax. That's when the real friction starts, because now the cost of the process becomes visible outside of IT's budget.
-- cost first