CASE STUDY

How a Mid-Market SaaS Provider Achieved SOC 2 Compliance in Just 12 Weeks

SaaS

Executive Summary

A rapidly growing SaaS provider serving mid-market and enterprise customers needed to demonstrate its security maturity to support expansion. With limited internal compliance resources, the organization turned to Aligned Technology Group (ATG) to guide them through achieving SOC 2 Type I compliance. Through a structured 12-week engagement leveraging Vanta automation and AWS best practices, the SaaS company not only passed its audit on the first try but also built a scalable compliance foundation to win larger enterprise deals.

Customer Overview

A fast-growing SaaS company offering a collaborative productivity platform to mid-market and enterprise customers. With a distributed engineering team and increasing demand from security-conscious clients, the company recognized the need to achieve SOC 2 compliance to support its growth trajectory.

Situation

As the SaaS company scaled, enterprise clients began requesting security attestations, with SOC 2 Type I being a common requirement. The engineering team was primarily focused on product development and lacked dedicated compliance expertise. Additionally, the company needed to ensure its AWS infrastructure aligned with SOC 2 controls to pass a formal audit.

Task

The company needed a consulting partner to:

  • Provide strategic and technical guidance on achieving SOC 2 Type I compliance

  • Optimize and document AWS infrastructure in line with security best practices

  • Accelerate implementation and leverage automation using Vanta

  • Support internal readiness and audit preparation

Action

ATG partnered closely with the client to:

  • Conduct a comprehensive gap assessment across the company’s cloud environment, access controls, and organizational policies

  • Configure Vanta to automate evidence collection and streamline ongoing compliance monitoring

  • Collaborate with the engineering team to implement AWS best practices, such as least-privilege IAM roles, encryption at rest and in transit, and logging via CloudTrail

  • Draft and formalize required policies and procedures, including risk assessments, incident response, and access reviews

  • Coach internal stakeholders on preparing for the SOC 2 Type I audit and serve as liaison with the audit firm

ATG Engagement & Expertise

This was a 12-week engagement, led by a cross-functional team of cloud architects and GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) specialists. The engagement was structured in three phases: Assessment & Planning, Implementation, and Readiness Support. ATG acted as both a strategic advisor and hands-on execution partner.

Key AWS services leveraged to meet compliance requirements included:

  • AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) – to enforce least-privilege access controls

  • AWS CloudTrail – for audit logging and traceability of user and API activity

  • AWS Config – to track configuration changes and evaluate compliance against defined rules

  • AWS KMS (Key Management Service) – for managing encryption keys across services

  • Amazon S3 – with encryption and access logging enabled for secure storage of compliance artifacts

  • AWS CloudWatch – for monitoring, alerting, and operational visibility

  • AWS GuardDuty – for threat detection and continuous security monitoring

These tools were configured and aligned with SOC 2 control objectives.

Result

The SaaS company successfully passed its SOC 2 Type I audit on the first attempt. With Vanta in place and AWS aligned to best practices, the client is now positioned to scale securely and confidently pursue larger enterprise deals. Additionally, internal teams gained clarity and confidence in managing compliance going forward.

Cost Optimization

Issue: Small AWS deployment with little management oversight and a lack of cloud skills internal to the organization moving from traditional infrastructure to SaaS and cloud based solutions.

 

What we did

  1. AWS Audit
  2. Cost Optimization Review
  3. Ongoing Monitoring

 

Result:

  • Eliminated unused storage volumes and the old application server no longer in use, the charges for AWS resulted in a savings of 51% per month.
  • We’ll continue to monitor AWS billing and finance to ensure maintenance of savings and identify other future changes.

Cost Optimization

Issue: Small AWS deployment with little management oversight and a lack of cloud skills internal to the organization moving from traditional infrastructure to SaaS and cloud based solutions.

 

What we did

  1. AWS Audit
  2. Cost Optimization Review
  3. Ongoing Monitoring

 

Result:

  • Eliminated unused storage volumes and the old application server no longer in use, the charges for AWS resulted in a savings of 51% per month.
  • We’ll continue to monitor AWS billing and finance to ensure maintenance of savings and identify other future changes.