What Compliance Standards Should You Get Before SOC 2?

People often treat SOC 2 like the final boss of a video game,assuming they must collect a sequence of lower-level certifications before they earn the right to face it. It is a reasonable assumption. It is also entirely wrong.

The reality is that there are no official SOC 2 prerequisites. You can march straight at it, no warm-up badges required.

But while there is no formal ladder to climb, two things genuinely belong before it. They just aren’t the things most people expect. Let’s sort it out.

First, the myth: no certificate unlocks SOC 2

Let’s kill the leveling-up idea. SOC 2 does not require you to hold ISO 27001, some “SOC 2 Lite,” or any other credential beforehand. There is no ladder. You do not earn your way up to it through a sequence of lesser certificates.

If you were worried you aren’t “allowed” to start SOC 2 yet, you can relax. You are. That said, doing it smartly means handling two realities first.

Before-SOC-2 thing #1: your mandatory obligations

If your business is legally or contractually required to comply with a standard, that standard comes first. SOC 2 is a voluntary trust signal. The law is not. When a legal requirement and a sales enabler compete for priority, the law wins.

• HIPAA, mandatory if you handle US health data.
• PCI DSS, mandatory if you process card payments.
• GDPR / DPDP, mandatory for handling EU / Indian personal data.

These are not prerequisites to SOC 2 in a formal sense. But they are legal realities. Handle your mandatory obligations first, then layer SOC 2 on top. The good news is that the controls overlap heavily, meaning the work is never wasted.

Before-SOC-2 thing #2: your security foundation

This is the real answer to what is required for SOC 2, and it has nothing to do with certificates. It is about building baseline security hygiene so you do not walk into an audit unprepared and faceplant.

You don’t certify this. You just build it.

• CIS Controls, a free, prioritized set of security best practices from the Center for Internet Security. A fantastic starting point for baseline hygiene.
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), a voluntary framework for structuring your security program. Great scaffolding to build on (note: it’s a framework to follow, not a badge you earn).
• The basics, MFA, access control, encryption, logging, documented policies.

Think of it this way: SOC 2 is the inspection. CIS Controls and NIST CSF help you build the house. If you show up to the inspection with no house, the audit will be painful, expensive, and short.

The actual “step before” the audit: a readiness assessment

If we are talking about what literally comes right before the audit, it is not a standard at all. It is a readiness (gap) assessment.

This is the pre-check that shows exactly where your controls fall short and hands you a fix-it roadmap before the real auditor shows up. It is the most practical, high-leverage item on any SOC 2 compliance checklist.

“But should I do ISO 27001 first?”

It is a common question. The answer is no. ISO 27001 isn’t a prerequisite, it’s an alternative or a parallel.

If you sell heavily into international or European markets, you might pursue ISO instead of or alongside SOC 2. But you do not need to complete ISO before you are allowed to do SOC 2. They are siblings, not steps. Because their controls overlap so heavily, doing one gives you a massive head start on the other.

The reframe

Here is the whole thing in one line: the real prerequisite for SOC 2 isn’t another certificate, it is readiness.

Handle whatever is legally mandatory for your business, build a genuine security foundation, run a readiness assessment, and then pursue the audit. That is the SOC 2 compliance roadmap that actually matters, rather than a stack of badges collected in order.

Where Regodit comes in

Notice that the actual sequence before SOC 2 involves mandatory frameworks, a real security foundation, and a readiness check. Juggling all of that across separate tools is a mess. That is exactly what Regodit (by Solsphere AI Inc.) is built to unify.

Regodit is an AI-powered GRC platform for continuous compliance that handles the whole sequence, not just the final audit.

• Covers your mandatory frameworks first. Regodit handles HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, DPDP, and ISO 27001 alongside SOC 2. If a required framework needs to come first, it lives in the same place, and the overlapping controls carry over.
• Builds and proves your foundation. Its always-on AI agents collect, validate, and organize evidence across your stack (AWS CloudTrail, GitHub, Kubernetes), turning baseline security hygiene into something continuously demonstrable. Teams doing it manually can burn 4–8 weeks just gathering evidence.
• Doubles as your readiness assessment. A live dashboard with real-time compliance scoring and control-readiness shows exactly where you stand before the audit, the “step before SOC 2,” built in.
• Automated risk management. Detection, scoring, and prioritization catch foundation gaps early.
• Real experts on tap. Not sure what to tackle before SOC 2? Chat with actual compliance experts.
• One hub through the whole audit. From readiness to certification.

Their line , ”compliance that learns, security that leads” , means the whole “what comes before SOC 2” sequence lives in one system instead of five. Companies like Valuenable have used it to catch gaps and map controls straight to what auditors wanted.

Figuring out what to tackle before SOC 2? Book a demo.

Bottom line: SOC 2 has no formal prerequisite. You do not need to collect other certificates first. But two things genuinely belong before it: your mandatory obligations (HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR/DPDP) if they legally apply, and your security foundation, built on free frameworks like CIS Controls and NIST CSF. ISO 27001 is a sibling, not a step.

Stop hunting for prerequisite certificates. Handle what is mandatory, build the foundation, check your readiness, and then go get your SOC 2.