SOC 2 for API-first companies, endpoint-level.
Your product is an endpoint, a key, and an SLA. Skadi audits API-first companies with controls that match: key lifecycle, rate-limit enforcement, availability commitments, and webhook integrity — evidenced directly from your infrastructure by a CPA who understands request-level testing, not just screenshots of admin consoles.
Audit challenges we solve for you.
Your customers' customers depend on your endpoints. A Security-only SOC 2 that ignores Availability leaves enterprise buyers unconvinced.
Thousands of live API keys across enterprise customers require lifecycle controls: scoped issuance, rotation, revocation, and exposure response — with an accountable principal on every key.
Rate limiting isn't just a feature — it is a control. Buyers want proof it operates as designed and protects them from noisy neighbors and credential-stuffing runs.
Unlike a marketing-SaaS buyer, an API company's buyer often has an SRE reading the system description. Vague uptime language, missing RTO/RPO, or unspecified failover behavior all become deal friction.
Controls that matter most for your business.
Issuance with least-privilege scoping, rotation cadence, revocation SLA, and evidence every key ties to an accountable customer principal — tested against sampled issuance and revocation events.
Enforced per-key and per-tenant quotas, anomaly detection, and evidence the controls block bad actors without harming legitimate customers.
Capacity planning artifacts, incident response with defined RTO/RPO, SLO monitoring, failover testing during the window, and postmortem evidence for every SLA-impacting event.
HMAC signing, replay protection, retry policy with idempotency, and delivery evidence — tested during fieldwork with sampled events, not accepted at face value.
Scanning of public repos and customer environments for leaked keys, automated rotation on detection, and customer notification workflow within a defined SLA.
Documented policy on version support windows, sunset notifications, and evidence customers were notified within contractual timelines. Sampled against the change log.
OAuth authorization server hardening, token lifetimes, refresh and revocation controls, and mTLS where offered — each tested distinctly rather than lumped under a single 'auth' control.
Structured request logging, retention aligned to customer contracts, and access controls on logs that may contain sensitive payloads.
What actually fails in this vertical.
Real deviations we see in SOC 2 Type II fieldwork — and what your platform and security teams should fix before the observation window starts.
Keys issued at customer onboarding still valid 3 years later with no rotation policy or evidence. Rotate on schedule, on employee departure, and on suspected exposure — all three tested.
- Key-management policy with rotation cadence and triggers
- API key metadata export showing created / last-rotated timestamps
- Rotation runbook with a completed run for the window
- Ticket for a rotation triggered by a leaver or exposure event
Global limits exist, per-tenant limits are 'planned.' Abuse control fails on walkthrough; a single noisy tenant can degrade availability for the population.
- Gateway config (Kong/Envoy/Cloudflare) with per-key limit rules
- Sample 429 logs for the window
- Abuse-response policy with escalation path
- Screenshot of tenant-level rate-limit dashboard
Status page derives from an internal health check, not synthetic traffic against public endpoints. Availability evidence rejected — must reflect what customers actually see.
- Synthetic monitor config (Datadog/Checkly/Pingdom) hitting public endpoints
- Monthly SLO report with error-budget math
- Status-page incident history for the window
- SLA schedule from a customer MSA cross-referenced to the SLO
Customers given 30 days for a breaking change when contract commits to 90. Change management + customer commitment failure at the same time.
- Deprecation policy stating the notice window
- Email/in-app notice archive with send timestamp
- Ticket linking deprecation to customer commitment doc
- API version registry showing sunset dates
One HMAC secret used for all outbound webhooks. Rotate to per-tenant secrets or a signature scheme with a customer identifier; auditors will flag the shared model on any modern API audit.
- Webhook signing implementation code / config
- Per-tenant secret storage screenshot (KMS/Vault)
- Customer docs describing signature verification
- Rotation log for webhook secrets
Postmortems have timelines but no error-budget consumption or affected-tenant list. Availability control operates but cannot be evidenced against SLA commitments.
- Postmortem template requiring impact + affected tenants
- Sample RCA doc for a SEV-1/2 in the window
- SLA credit calculation worksheet if triggered
- Incident-response policy referencing customer notification SLA
Why generic SOC 2 misses the point for APIs
A generic SOC 2 audit treats an API company like a SaaS with a web UI. It samples user logins, walks through admin screens, and never touches the actual product surface. Skadi audits your API the way a serious buyer evaluates it: request-level sampling, key issuance and revocation traces, rate-limit control testing, and webhook signature verification against replayed events.
Availability as a first-class criterion
If your revenue contract says '99.99% uptime,' your SOC 2 must include Availability (A1). That means capacity forecasting, incident response drills, RTO/RPO definitions, and evidence they were exercised over the observation window. It is the difference between a report enterprise SREs believe and one they do not — and the report they do not believe becomes a security questionnaire.
Key lifecycle is the compensating control for everything
In API companies, poor key hygiene is the entry point for almost every incident that ends up in a customer's inbox. We test issuance, scoping, rotation, revocation, and exposure response as a single lifecycle — with sampling across the observation window and traceability from issuance event to responsible party. Weak controls here get flagged early, not on report day.
Enterprise buyer questions we pre-empt
'What happens if a customer's key leaks?' 'Do you sign webhooks?' 'How do you handle deprecations?' 'What's your abuse response?' 'How long until you notify us of an incident?' These questions come up in every enterprise deal. A scoped report that addresses them proactively can replace an entire security questionnaire and shorten sales cycles measurably.
Questions we hear from teams like yours.
Ready to scope your SOC 2 Type II?
Book a call and we'll walk you through timeline, scope, and pricing for your company.