SOC 2 (2017 TSC)·Criterion CC1.3·medium·Component: Common Criteria (Security)

What this control requires

Management establishes, with board oversight, structures, reporting lines, and appropriate authorities and responsibilities in the pursuit of objectives.
— SOC 2 (2017 TSC), Criterion CC1.3

In plain English

Management establishes, with board oversight, structures, reporting lines, and appropriate authorities and responsibilities in the pursuit of objectives. In practice, this means you can prove you organizational objectives-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

Every SOC 2 audit opinion is built control-by-control from the Trust Services Criteria. A missing or failing criterion produces an exception in the report, which buyers, partners and procurement teams read line-by-line during vendor reviews.

What an auditor looks for

A SOC 2 auditor (under AT-C §§ 105/205) tests both design and operating effectiveness over the audit window. For each criterion they expect a written control, a control owner, a population of events, and a sample tested against the population — including remediation tickets for exceptions.

Within Common Criteria (Security), the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Criterion CC1.3) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

Secure Development

Pipeline. Require code review, SAST (Semgrep / Snyk Code), SCA (Dependabot / Renovate), secret-scanning and IaC scanning in the merge pipeline.

Branch protection. Protected branches enforce reviews, signed commits and passing CI before merge; document the protection rules as the control evidence.

Code Review Testing

Pipeline. Require at least one human reviewer plus passing CI (lint, type, unit, security scan) before merge — protected branches enforce this.

Operational checklist

  • Organizational. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Security. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Management. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Secure. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Scope: objectives, management.

Evidence to collect

  • Code Repo Scan. Source-control evidence — branch protection, required reviewers, CI status, SCA / SAST reports.
  • Infra Scan. Continuous infrastructure-posture telemetry — AWS Config, Azure Policy compliance, GCP Organisation Policy, Wiz / Prisma findings.

Source control pipelines (GitHub, GitLab) enforce SDLC guardrails. Focus: Organizational Structure and Reporting Lines (Original component: Control Environment).

Common pitfalls

  • CI security checks set to warn-only; the merge button is faster than the security feedback.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

Related controls in SOC 2 (2017 TSC)

References

Topics: application securitysecure developmentcode review testingdevsecops