SOC 2 Shouldn’t Be a Fire Drill - It Should Be How You Already Operate

Let’s be honest: SOC 2 has a reputation, and not a great one.
For most companies, it shows up as a blocker—deals stall. Teams scramble. Suddenly, your CTO, engineers, and ops team are buried in evidence collection instead of building the business.
We’ve seen this pattern over and over again. And it’s not because companies don’t care about security; it’s because the process is broken.
The industry has treated SOC 2 as an exhausting project rather than what it should be: a natural outcome of good security and next steps.
That’s why we’re so involved in how different platforms and auditors treat the process. We partner with a select group of teams—including Rippling—because we genuinely believe in what they’re building, but our perspective remains independent, grounded in objective analysis and real-world testing.

What Rippling is building is a new take on the execution, because of their foundation in a company’s evidence, and here is our view of it.

Compliance Isn’t the Hard Part. Execution Is.

Most compliance platforms sell you the promise of dashboards, alerts, and visibility. But here’s the reality from our perspective on the front lines: visibility was never the actual problem. Execution is.
We regularly work with companies that know what’s wrong:

• Devices not encrypted

• Access not properly scoped

• Controls are not enforced consistently

The issue isn’t awareness—it’s that fixing those gaps requires jumping across multiple tools, teams, and workflows. That’s where compliance becomes expensive, slow, and painful.Rippling is flipping that model. Because it’s already the system of record for people, devices, and access, the evidence isn’t something you chase—it’s already there. And more importantly, when something breaks, you fix it in the same place.That shift—from “track” to “enforce”—is what actually moves the needle.

Where We Come In: Proving It Actually Works

Here’s the part most compliance conversations avoid:
Passing an audit doesn’t mean you’re secure.
At Red Sentry, we come in after the controls are “in place” and independently ask a different question:
Can this actually be exploited?
That’s where our partnership with Rippling matters, because it addresses the root causes of the problem.
Rippling helps companies operationalize controls—things like access reviews, device security, and policy enforcement—directly into day-to-day workflows.
We validate whether those controls hold up under real-world attack conditions.
Because in practice:

• Misconfigured access still happens

• Over-permissioned users still exist

• Gaps between tools still create attack paths

Compliance tells you you should be secure.
Penetration testing shows you whether you actually are.

The Future Is Continuous, Not Annual

One of the biggest shifts we’re seeing is moving away from “audit season.” Your security must be continuous, always hardwired into the daily operations of your organization rather than treated as a massive, annual scramble for evidence.
Rippling is pushing in that direction by making controls part of the workflow:

• Employees are onboarded with the right access from day one

• Devices are configured correctly by default

• Policies enforced automatically

That’s what modern compliance should look like. And when you layer real-world testing on top of that, you don’t just pass audits—you build actual resilience.
A Better Way to Think About SOC 2
SOC 2 shouldn’t slow your business down. It shouldn’t pull your team away from what matters. And it definitely shouldn’t be the first time you realize something is broken.
The companies getting this right are doing two things:

1. Operationalizing compliance (Rippling)

2. Validating it under pressure (Red Sentry)

That’s the difference between checking a box and actually being secure. Compliance is table stakes. Trust is earned.
And trust doesn’t come from passing an audit—it comes from knowing your systems hold up in the real world.
That’s exactly the critical gap our partnership was built to close. Please look for yourselves and see if this solution will help your security posture. As always, reach out if you have any questions!