The SOC 2 Demand Signal Is No Longer Optional

Enterprise security reviews have quietly shifted from “nice to have” documentation checks to deal-blocking requirements. Here’s what’s driving the change — and what it costs companies that aren’t ready.

In early 2025, a breach at SitusAMC — a financial services and technology provider — ultimately affected several large institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Morgan Stanley. The attackers did not breach those banks directly. They compromised a trusted vendor and used that access as a path into well-protected downstream environments. The banks’ own security controls were strong. Their vendor’s were not. The incident cost far more than the breach itself; it cost those financial institutions credibility with regulators who immediately asked one question: how did you vet this vendor?

That question is now being asked in every enterprise sales process. When a growing SaaS company tries to close a deal with a company that has experienced — or closely watched — a vendor-sourced breach, the security review is no longer a late-stage formality. It is an early-stage qualification. Deals are being stalled and lost not because the product is wrong, but because the vendor cannot answer basic questions about how they protect customer data.

Vanta’s 2025 State of Trust report, which surveyed more than 2,500 IT and business leaders, found that 46% had already experienced a data breach traced back to a vendor after the partnership began.

The gap is rarely technical. The SaaS companies that fail enterprise security reviews are not usually running insecure systems. They are running systems without the paper trail that enterprise security teams need to check their own boxes. A SOC 2 audit requires evidence that controls exist and operate over time — not just that someone intended to implement them. An Information Security Policy needs to exist as a document, reviewed and approved, before an enterprise buyer will accept it. An Incident Response Plan needs to be written down and tested, not just understood informally by the engineering team that would handle a breach if one occurred.

This is the practical problem: enterprise buyers are working from standardized questionnaires that ask for documentation. When a startup answers “we do this informally” or “our team knows how to handle this,” the reviewer marks the control as absent. From the buyer’s perspective, if it is not documented, it does not exist. The cost of that failure is not just one lost deal — it is a deferred enterprise motion that can set a company back by months or years at a critical growth stage.

The encouraging part is that the gap is closeable. Companies that have solid practices but poor documentation can often get their security posture into enterprise-ready shape in a matter of weeks. The key is knowing exactly which controls are being evaluated, which frameworks enterprise buyers reference most, and which documentation gaps are most likely to be deal-blockers. That intelligence, applied quickly and systematically, is the difference between passing a security review and failing one.

Sources: Kybersecure — Biggest Cybersecurity Breaches of 2025 · CM Alliance TPRM Tools 2026 Guide · TrustCloud TPRM Trends & Technology · Vanta 2025 State of Trust