An attestation report versus a certificate, a US default versus an international one — and an overlap so large that treating them as separate projects means paying twice.
Sell mostly to US enterprises → SOC 2. Sell internationally or to companies that are themselves ISO-certified → ISO 27001. SOC 2 is an auditor's attestation report on your controls against the AICPA Trust Services Criteria; ISO 27001 is a certification of your information security management system against an international standard. They overlap roughly 80% at the control level — which is exactly why doing them as separate projects is paying twice — and increasingly, growing companies end up needing both.
This question is usually asked by a technology company that just hit the procurement wall: an enterprise deal stalled pending "your SOC 2," or an EU prospect asked for "your ISO certificate." The honest answer has three parts: what each one actually is, how buyers treat them, and why the either/or framing is quietly obsolete.
| SOC 2 | ISO/IEC 27001:2022 | |
|---|---|---|
| Output | Attestation report (Type I: point-in-time design; Type II: operating effectiveness over a 3–12 month window) by a CPA firm | Certificate from an accredited certification body; 3-year cycle with annual surveillance audits |
| Basis | AICPA Trust Services Criteria (Security required; Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity, Privacy optional) | ISMS requirements (clauses 4–10) plus 93 Annex A controls across 4 themes |
| Geography of demand | Dominant with US buyers, especially SaaS procurement | Default internationally; common in EU, UK, APAC procurement |
| Philosophy | Prove your controls operated, in a detailed report buyers read | Prove you run a management system that sustains security, summarized in a certificate |
| Typical first-time effort | 3–6 months prep + the Type II observation window | 6–12 months prep + stage 1/stage 2 certification audits |
At the control level, the two overlap heavily — access management, encryption, change management, vendor management, incident response, logging. An organization that runs them as two independent projects collects and justifies largely the same evidence twice, on two timelines, in two vocabularies. An organization whose evidence is cross-mapped does the work once: in PRISM, the artifacts you upload are assessed against SOC 2's criteria and ISO 27001's Annex A simultaneously — plus the other 32 frameworks, from NIST CSF for your board to HIPAA/HITRUST if healthcare is in your pipeline. The second framework stops being a second program and becomes a second report from the same evidence pool. The same applies to the customer questionnaires that started this whole conversation — which are really just unaccredited frameworks, and we've written about taming those separately.
Cross-framework evidence mapping compresses preparation, not the assessments themselves — a SOC 2 still requires a CPA firm's examination and ISO 27001 still requires an accredited certification body. What changes is what those engagements cost you in internal hours and friction: assessors price clean, consistently-mapped evidence packages very differently from spreadsheet archaeology.
PRISM assesses your evidence against SOC 2 and ISO 27001 simultaneously—and the 32 other frameworks your next customer will ask about.