How to successfully prepare for security and compliance certifications

Do clients keep turning you down because of security concerns? Do you need to prove you can handle sensitive data responsibly? Or maybe regulators are knocking, asking about credit card protections or healthcare information safeguards.

Don’t worry, friend. You already have security in place. Now it’s time to prove it. Certification is how you show the world your program isn’t just talk — it’s tested.

Choosing the right certification

So, you want to get your security program certified? Excellent! But before you pull out the keyboard for paperwork, the very first step is choosing the right certification for your business.

• B2B companies: Working with other firms? Why, SOC 2 is a fine choice! It proves you’ve put controls in place to keep systems safe and customer data secure.
• International business: Then ISO 27001 may suit you better. Customers across the globe recognize it as a sign of world-class information security.
• Handling credit cards: That’s PCI DSS.
• Medical business: Better know HIPAA.
• Selling to Uncle Sam: That might mean FedRAMP or another government standard.

Certifications, especially audited ones, can become costly. Depending on your environment, data, regulatory requirements, and customer, you may need one or several. So, the first step is really understanding what you need and why. Have a security expert at your company or a consultant guide you.

Good news about overlap

The encouraging part is that the controls for most security programs overlap. Once you’ve built a solid security program for one framework, you can often map those same controls to another. That means every dollar and hour you spend strengthens your ability to meet multiple standards, not just one.

Set boundaries

You now know which certification you need. But certification can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. One way to alleviate that is to narrow the scope of the environment that is being certified. For example, with PCI, you can design systems so that credit card data only flows through a limited part of your environment and restrict access to that segment. With SOC 2, you declare which parts of your environment will be tested against your controls.

Fence in your specific certifiable environment to save yourself some time and money! This isn’t just a way to save time and money; it’s also good security practice because it reduces where sensitive data is handled.

Now that you’ve decided to be certified, it’s policy time

Every framework has a requirement for you to have a set of policies representing your security program. In times past, these policies were written in unintelligible legalese by lawyers and insurance companies. But now, you can use your friendly computer robot (LLM like ChatGPT) to help you write your policies. I know this seems like the future, and that’s because it is!

These are the bedrock policies of any certified security program:

• Information Security Policy – top-level, management-approved statement of security principles.
• Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) – how employees can and can’t use company systems.
• Access Control Policy – user account provisioning, least privilege, RBAC.
• Password & Authentication Policy – complexity, MFA, resets.
• Change Management Policy – how changes to systems, software, and infrastructure are requested, tested, approved, and logged.
• Risk Management Policy – how you identify, assess, and mitigate risks.
• Incident Response Policy – process for detecting, reporting, containing, and learning from incidents.
• Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Policy – ensuring uptime and recovery plans.
• Vendor & Third-Party Management Policy – due diligence, contracts, monitoring.
• Data Classification & Handling Policy – defining categories of data (confidential, public, regulated) and how each must be treated.
• Training & Awareness Policy – onboarding, annual refreshers, phishing simulations.

When you write your policies, make sure they are tailored to the truth about your environment and tool-agnostic so that you don’t have to rewrite them if your environment changes.

Note: Your specific framework may require a different set of policies, so make sure you are aligning to what you require.

Preparing for an audit

When your auditor comes to ensure you are meeting the requirements of your program, they are going to request evidence for it. So if, for example, you say you review vulnerabilities and remediate critical ones in 48 hours, the auditor will ask you to provide proof of that. Or, if you say you require 11-character passwords with at least 3 of the recommended special characters, you will need to show your auditor proof of that setting in your environment. I recommend you collect the evidence in advance so that you know where your gaps in your program may be (and can remediate them prior to audit).

There are also many wonderful governance-risk-compliance (GRC) tools available that can automate evidence collection for you and your team and give your auditor controlled access to your environment to view and test the policies and evidence.

It’s OK if you have gaps

While you are going to do the absolute best you can to write solid policies and meet the requirements, there will almost always be some gaps. That is normal, and it is perfectly fine. No program, especially a first-time certification effort, is ever perfect. Part of the value of going through an audit is discovering those gaps in the first place.

The auditor’s role is not to punish you; it is to test your program against the framework and highlight where things do not fully align. When they identify issues, that is not a failure, it is an opportunity. You will take those findings, document them, and build a remediation plan. That plan lays out what needs to be fixed, who is responsible, and the timeline for closing the gap.

Also, remember that not every control will fit neatly into your environment. The auditor’s role is to help identify gaps and guide you toward remediation, but the process is also a conversation. If a control doesn’t apply as written, or if you’re addressing it in a different but equally effective way, that’s something to discuss and document.

Handled well, remediation strengthens your program, demonstrates maturity to your customers, and shows that you are not just chasing a certificate but are committed to improving your security posture over time.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Certification isn’t about perfection; it’s about proving that your security program is built on real controls, tested in practice, and ready to improve where needed. You choose the right certification, set the boundaries, write policies that reflect reality, prepare your evidence, and learn from the gaps.

Handled step by step, certification becomes less of a mountain and more of a well-marked trail. At the end, you not only get the piece of paper on the wall—you get a stronger, clearer security program that earns trust from your customers and keeps your business ready for what’s next.

About the authors

Hadas Cassorla, JD, MBA, CISSP has a lot of letters after her name, but the three letters she cares the most about are Y-E-S. Marrying her improv and legal background into technology and business, she helps organizations build strong, actionable and implementable security programs by getting buy-in from investors, the boardroom and employees. She has founded her own business, Scale Security Group, and has built corporate security offices from ground-up.