How to Automate Continuous SOC 2 Monitoring in Cloud Environments

Security teams spend their time detecting threats, while compliance teams focus on collecting evidence, with two separate workflows that rarely share the same systems. Both teams are looking at the same underlying events, but the work stays disconnected.

In cloud environments, this gap is amplified. Investigations and audit artifacts stored in separate systems make SOC 2 far more effort than it needs to be, because the entire program ends up built around manual checkpoints rather than continuous telemetry. A single audit can turn into weeks of digging for logs, rerunning access reviews, and tracking down screenshots that may already be out of date.

In our recent webinar with AWS, Vanta, and Latacora, each panelist described the same bottleneck from a different angle: SOC 2 becomes unpredictable when evidence is only collected at the end. When security and compliance teams share one telemetry pipeline, the entire process becomes much steadier. Without that connection, every audit season feels like starting over.

Why Cloud SOC 2 Programs Break Down

Most organizations, especially those selling into enterprise or healthcare markets, will expand into additional compliance frameworks, such as ISO 27001 or HIPAA, within the next year or two after achieving SOC 2. What looks manageable with SOC 2 quickly becomes overwhelming when the number of required controls doubles, and the evidence requests become more exact.

Cloud teams tend to run into a few recurring issues:

Fragmented Telemetry

CloudTrail logs stay in one place, Config snapshots in another. Identity data lives in Okta, Azure AD, or an internal SSO provider. GitHub and GitLab store approval and deployment histories separately. SaaS tools each generate their own flavor of audit logs. None of these systems speak the same language out of the box.

Teams try to compensate by exporting CSV files, copying screenshots, or stitching together evidence in spreadsheets. But the data is only current for a moment. A new user provisioned incorrectly, or a misconfigured policy, can invalidate previous proof, with no real visibility until an auditor asks about it.

Point-in-Time Evidence

Even the most diligent teams fall into the same trap: they prepare for SOC 2 once a year. During prep, they generate reports, re-run checks, and gather artifacts. Everything is accurate for a day, or maybe a week, before something changes. Auditors know this. They’ll ask for multiple evidence samples across different time ranges, which forces teams to repeat the same manual process.

No Connection Between Security Operations and Compliance

Security teams detect threats. Compliance teams collect evidence. Without a shared data foundation, these workflows diverge. Investigations happen in one set of tools; audit artifacts sit in another. The two never meet, even when they’re referencing the same underlying events. This is why cloud SOC 2 programs feel heavier than they should. They’re built around manual checkpoints instead of continuous telemetry.

What a Continuous Monitoring Architecture Actually Looks Like

A sustainable, year-round SOC 2 program looks less like a checklist and more like a connected system. The architecture aligns the tools your team already uses into a single data pipeline rather than layering new systems on top.

During the webinar, the panelists walked through an architecture that works reliably across organizations of all sizes. The flow is simple, but the consistency is what matters.

Start With Cloud Infrastructure Telemetry

Infrastructure telemetry forms the backbone of SOC 2 monitoring.

• CloudTrail records every API call across the account: who changed a security group, who accessed a bucket, who modified an IAM policy.

• AWS Config tracks configuration states and changes over time: encryption settings, resource relationships, IAM conditions, and lifecycle rules.

• Security Hub runs continuous checks against AWS best practices and industry standards.

This trio creates immutable logs that map directly to availability, confidentiality, and change-management controls. They’re also the first systems auditors expect to see.

Layer in Identity Providers

CloudTrail alone can’t explain who initiated an action. If an engineer accidentally grants a broad policy or a contractor logs in without MFA, you need identity context.

Okta and Azure AD provide that view. They show:

• Authentication attempts

• MFA enforcement

• Role provisioning

• SSO flows

• Device context

When these CloudTrail and Config logs flow into Panther’s centralized data lake, you can validate identity controls in near real-time. During the webinar, Latacora showed how they answered an auditor question, whether all GitHub runners were using workload identities, almost instantly by correlating identity logs with pipeline data. 

What would typically take days of manual checking has been turned into a single query.

Pull CI/CD and Code Activity

Every SOC 2 audit asks about change-management controls. Teams must show:

• Who made a change

• Who approved it
  When it was deployed

• Whether it followed policy

GitHub and GitLab already generate this information, but it’s often fragmented from the rest of your security data. Panther enables security teams to centralize pipeline logs with cloud and identity data, making it straightforward to correlate changes across systems. That’s what auditors want to see: a complete story.

Include SaaS Activity

Many controls depend on collaboration systems, ticketing tools, CRM platforms, and office suites. Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, and similar tools generate security-relevant events such as file sharing, permission changes, admin actions, and authentication failures.

Ignoring these logs leaves major blind spots. Integrating them gives your compliance and security teams visibility into the whole environment, not just the cloud infrastructure.

Tie It All Together With a Unified Security Data Lake

This is where Panther sits. Panther ingests logs across your infrastructure, identity provider, CI/CD workflows, and SaaS tools into a cloud-native data lake. Detections run in real-time. Every alert, triage action, and rule revision is preserved with context.

Docker leaned on this architecture to triple their log coverage while reducing alert noise. Cockroach Labs expanded its retention from 30 days to an entire year of searchable history. Neither team had to rethink their tech stack; they just needed to connect the systems they already used. Once telemetry flows to a single place, compliance workflows become far simpler.

A Practical Workflow for Continuous Monitoring

With unified telemetry in place, the day-to-day process becomes repeatable and clear. Instead of preparing once a year, the system continuously validates your environment.

1. Map Controls to Real Systems

Even with platforms like Vanta providing pre-mapped frameworks, the mappings must reflect your actual environment. If MFA is enforced through Okta, the evidence should come directly from Okta logs. If S3 encryption is controlled through Config, then that would be your source of truth. Correct mapping prevents evidence drift and ensures your monitoring aligns with the claims you make to auditors.

2. Run Continuous Checks

Checks should run constantly to keep pace with the changes in your environment.

Continuous checks help teams catch:

• Disabled CloudTrail regions

• Publicly accessible S3 buckets

• Expanded IAM policies

• Unapproved GitHub workflow changes

• Missing encryption or retention settings

These are common misconfigurations auditors ask about. The more often your system evaluates them, the more confident you can be in your compliance posture at all times, and especially during an audit. 

3. Treat Failed Checks as Real Alerts

A failed control check is both a misconfiguration and a security signal. When a check fails, Panther raises a real alert with the full context: what changed, who made the change, and whether it aligns with policy.

This dual use matters. It shows:

• Your monitoring pipeline works

• Security teams acted on findings

• Controls detect drift in practice, not just theory

Docker’s team adopted detection-as-code and version-controlled rules to cut false positives by 85% while increasing detection coverage. Every rule change doubled as an audit artifact.

4. Feed Evidence Directly Into Vanta

Vanta continuously pulls data from AWS, identity systems, and Panther. The result is a dashboard that always reflects the current state of controls. During the webinar, Vanta’s team emphasized that this workflow prevents the worst-case scenario: discovering missing evidence right before an audit. With continuous collection, teams stay ready without scrambling.

Automating Evidence Collection

Evidence collection is the most labor-intensive part of SOC 2 for growing companies. Screenshots and exports introduce inconsistencies that auditors immediately question. More importantly, they rely on human timing; if you forget to capture a moment, it’s gone.

Continuous monitoring solves this by automating from the source systems:

• CloudTrail logs validate identity enforcement, bucket access, and API changes.

• Config snapshots prove encryption, patching, and retention settings.

• Identity providers continuously supply user inventories and MFA status.

• SaaS tools provide real-time access control and activity logs.

Panther’s data lake becomes the record of truth. Every detection, triage step, remediation update, and rule change exists in the same evidence store that auditors rely on. Queries replace screenshots. Logs replace spreadsheets.

Latacora’s webinar demonstration drove this home. When an auditor asked which machines had specific kernel extensions installed, something that typically takes days of manual checking, he answered in seconds by querying unified telemetry.

Unified data turns investigations into commodity tasks rather than bespoke efforts.

Showing Controls Work in Practice

Auditors require operational proof that controls exist. Consider a misconfiguration in an S3 bucket:

1. A detection fires in Panther.

2. The system routes context showing who made the change and how.

3. The remediation is logged in the same place, with timestamps.

4. The detection rule itself is versioned in Git, showing its evolution.

That single event satisfies monitoring, risk detection, and incident response controls. More importantly, the evidence arises naturally from real operations. Teams aren’t generating artificial test cases to appease auditors.

This is what continuous monitoring looks like in practice: compliance as a property of your actual security operations, not an after-the-fact exercise.

What Teams Gain From This Approach

Real customers see meaningful differences when they unify their telemetry and automate their SOC 2 program.

• Docker tripled log coverage without incurring cost penalties typical for legacy SIEMs. Their false positives dropped by 85%, and audit prep shrank dramatically because their evidence lived in one place.

• Cockroach Labs moved from 30 days to one year of searchable logs. Their audit prep time dropped by 90%, and they gained a far richer incident-response timeline.

• Latacora collapses multi-day evidence hunts into seconds by querying unified cloud and identity telemetry during audits.

Lean teams feel the most impact from architecture that serves security, compliance, and engineering without additional staffing. A single source of truth ingests logs, runs detections, captures evidence, and supports investigations. Rather than stitching disparate tools together, this continuous system works as a single monitoring layer.

A More Sustainable SOC 2 Program

The traditional compliance model doesn't scale with modern cloud environments. When you're deploying infrastructure as code, managing multi-cloud environments, and releasing software continuously, your compliance program must keep pace.

The architecture demonstrated in our webinar combines cloud-native security monitoring (Panther), automated compliance platforms (Vanta), and cloud provider security services (AWS). Embedding compliance into your security operations should be the new standard for SOC 2 compliance. 

The path forward: centralize your security data in a cloud-native platform, automate evidence collection through deep integrations, maintain continuous control validation, and provide real-time visibility to auditors and stakeholders. The technology exists today. The question is whether your organization will continue the quarterly scramble or join the teams already operating with continuous compliance.

Ready to see how this works in practice? Watch the full webinar for live demonstrations and detailed technical insights from Panther, AWS, Vanta, and Latacora on building for continuous compliance in cloud environments.