I am not defending Delve or anything and I hope they get what they deserver but there is no correlation between SOC2 certification and the actual cyber capability of a company. SOC2 and ISO27001 is just compliance and frankly most of it is BS.
A) I tie the cybersecurity activities to business revenue enabling outcomes (unblocked contracts), and second to reduced risk (as people react less to this when spending the buck).
B) with the political capital from point A) I actually operate a cybersecurity program, justify DevSecOps artefacts, threat modeling, incident response exercises, etc.
What this SOC2 reports, ISO27k certificates are, more like a standardization for communicating the activities of the org to outside people, and getting an external person to vet that the org doesn't bulls*t too much. but at the end of the day, the organization is responsible for keeping their house in order.
It’s a framework to give you the direction, then if employees are careless (or even malicious), no security standard is complete enough to protect a company.
If a service provider has a control that says "we use firewalls on all network access points, and configure those firewalls to CIS benchmark whatever", and a third-party signs off with "yes we checked, they have the firewalls, and they're configured properly", you now have two parties you can sue when a security incident caused by lack of firewalls causes you material damage.
Your org's cyber insurance will also go down if you can say "all our vendors have third-party attested compliance, and we do annual compliance reviews".
But it's not useless. It still forces you to go through a very useful exercise of risk modeling and preparation that you most likely won't do without a formal program.
It's incredibly easy to get SOC 2 audited and still have terrible security.
> forces you to go through a very useful exercise of risk modeling
Have you actually done this in Vanta, though? You would have to go out of your way to do it in a manner that actually adds significant value to your security posture.
(I don't think SOC/ISO are a waste of time. We do it at our company, but for reasons that have nothing to do with security)
If you do it well, a startup can go through SOC2 and use it as an opportunity to put together a reasonable cybersecurity practice. Though, yeah, one does not actually beget the other, you can also very easily get a soc2 report with minimal findings with a really bad cybersecurity practice.
Because there's no adversarial pressure as a check and balance to the security, and AICPA is clearly just happy to take the fees, it's a hollow shirt. It's like this scene from The Big Short. https://youtu.be/mwdo17GT6sg?si=Hzada9JcdIPfdyFN&t=140
As usual, it's only people that care that force positive change. The companies that want good security will have good security. Customers who want good security will demand good security.