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• Your Essential SOC 2 Compliance Checklist

  11 mars, par Daniel Crough — Privacy, Security

  With cloud-hosted applications becoming the norm, organisations face increasing data security and compliance challenges. SOC 2 (System and Organisation Controls 2) provides a structured framework for addressing these challenges. Established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), SOC 2 has become a critical standard for demonstrating trustworthiness to clients and partners.

  A well-structured SOC 2 compliance checklist serves as your roadmap to successful audits and effective security practices. In this post, we’ll walk through the essential steps to achieve SOC 2 compliance and explain how proper analytics practices play a crucial role in maintaining this important certification.

  Download SOC2 Checklist

  

  What is SOC 2 compliance ?

  SOC 2 compliance applies to service organisations that handle sensitive customer data. While not mandatory, this certification builds significant trust with customers and partners.

  According to the AICPA, “SOC 2 reports are intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users that need detailed information and assurance about the controls at a service organisation relevant to security, availability, and processing integrity of the systems the service organisation uses to process users’ data and the confidentiality and privacy of the information processed by these systems.“

  At its core, SOC 2 helps organisations protect customer data through five fundamental principles : security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

  Think of it as a seal of approval that tells customers, “We take data protection seriously, and here’s the evidence.”

  Companies undergo SOC 2 audits to evaluate their compliance with these standards. During these audits, independent auditors assess internal controls over data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

  What is a SOC 2 compliance checklist ?

  A SOC 2 compliance checklist is a comprehensive guide that outlines all the necessary steps and controls an organisation needs to implement to achieve SOC 2 certification. It covers essential areas including :

  • Security policies and procedures
  • Access control measures
  • Risk assessment protocols
  • Incident response plans
  • Disaster recovery procedures
  • Vendor management practices
  • Data encryption standards
  • Network security controls

  SOC 2 compliance checklist benefits

  A structured SOC 2 compliance checklist offers several significant advantages :

  Preparedness

  Preparing for a SOC 2 examination involves many complex elements. A checklist provides a clear, structured path, breaking the process into manageable tasks that ensure nothing is overlooked.

  Resource optimisation

  A comprehensive checklist reduces time spent identifying requirements, minimises costly mistakes and oversights, and enables more precise budget planning for the compliance process.

  Better team alignment

  A SOC 2 checklist establishes clear responsibilities for team members and maintains consistent understanding across all departments, helping align internal processes with industry standards.

  Risk reduction

  Following a SOC 2 compliance checklist significantly reduces the risk of compliance violations. Systematically reviewing internal controls provides opportunities to catch security gaps early, mitigating the risk of data breaches and unauthorised access.

  Audit readiness

  A well-maintained checklist simplifies audit preparation, reduces stress during the audit process, and accelerates the certification timeline.

  Business growth

  A successful SOC 2 audit demonstrates your organisation’s commitment to data security, which can be decisive in winning new business, especially with enterprise clients who require this certification from their vendors.

  Challenges in implementing SOC 2

  Implementing SOC 2 presents several significant challenges :

  Time-intensive documentation

  Maintaining accurate records throughout the SOC 2 compliance process requires diligence and attention to detail. Many organisations struggle to compile comprehensive documentation of all controls, policies and procedures, leading to delays and increased costs.

  Incorrect scoping of the audit

  Misjudging the scope can result in unnecessary expenses and extended timelines. Including too many systems complicates the process and diverts resources from critical areas.

  Maintaining ongoing compliance

  After achieving initial compliance, continuous monitoring becomes essential but is often neglected. Regular internal control audits can be overwhelming, especially for smaller organisations without dedicated compliance teams.

  Resource constraints

  Many organisations lack sufficient resources to dedicate to compliance efforts. This limitation can lead to staff burnout or reliance on expensive external consultants.

  Employee resistance

  Staff members may view new security protocols as unnecessary hurdles. Employees who aren’t adequately trained on SOC 2 requirements might inadvertently compromise compliance efforts through improper data handling.

  Analytics and SOC 2 compliance : A critical relationship

  One often overlooked aspect of SOC 2 compliance is the handling of analytics data. User behaviour data collection directly impacts multiple Trust Service Criteria, particularly privacy and confidentiality.

  Why analytics matters for SOC 2

  Standard analytics platforms often collect significant amounts of personal data, creating potential compliance risks :

  1. Privacy concerns : Many analytics tools collect personal information without proper consent mechanisms
  2. Data ownership issues : When analytics data is processed on third-party servers, maintaining control becomes challenging
  3. Confidentiality risks : Analytics data might be shared with advertising networks or other third parties
  4. Processing integrity questions : When data is transformed or aggregated by third parties, verification becomes difficult

  How Matomo supports SOC 2 compliance

  

  Matomo’s privacy-first analytics approach directly addresses these concerns :

  1. Complete data ownership : With Matomo, all analytics data remains under your control, either on your own servers or in a dedicated cloud instance
  2. Consent management : Built-in tools for managing user consent align with privacy requirements
  3. Data minimisation : Configurable anonymisation features help reduce collection of sensitive personal data
  4. Transparency : Clear documentation of data flows supports audit requirements
  5. Configurable data retention : Set automated data deletion schedules to comply with your policies

  By implementing Matomo as part of your SOC 2 compliance strategy, you address key requirements while maintaining the valuable insights your organisation needs for growth.

  Conclusion

  A SOC 2 compliance checklist helps organisations meet critical security and privacy standards. By taking a methodical approach to compliance and implementing privacy-respecting analytics, you can build trust with customers while protecting sensitive data.

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• How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  To be able to grow your business, it is crucial to track all your marketing efforts. This includes all newsletters and emails that you share with people outside of your business. Otherwise, you won’t be able to know which of your daily efforts are yielding results.

  Are you wondering if it is possible to track the performance of an emailing campaign in Matomo (Piwik) efficiently ? Would you like to know if it is technically easy ? No worries, here is a “How to” tutorial showing you how easily you can track an emailing in Matomo properly.

  Different tracking levels for different needs

  There are many things that you may be interested to track, for example :

  

  1. How many users opened your email
  2. How many users interacted with the links in your email
  3. How many users interacted on your website through your email

  Let’s have a look at each of these levels.

  Step 1 – Tracking email and newsletter openings in Matomo

  Tracking email openings requires to add an HTML code to your newsletter. It works through what we call a tracking pixel, a tiny image of 1×1 that is transparent so the user will not be able to see it.
  In order to install it, here is an example of what this code looks like :

  <img src="https://piwik.example.com/piwik.php?idsite=YOUR_PIWIK_WEBSITE_ID&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ" style="border:0;” alt="" />

  The Matomo tracking pixel explained

  The above URL is composed of the following URL parameters which are part of our Tracking API :

  • idsite : Corresponds to the ID of the website you would like to track.
  • rec : You need to have rec=1 in order for the request to be actually recorded.
  • bots : Set it to 1 to include all the connections made to this request, bots included.
  • url : corresponds to the URL you would like to display in Matomo (Piwik) every time the email is opened.
  • action_name : This is the page name you would like to be tracked when the email is opened.
  • _rcn : The name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • _rck : The keyword you may like to use in order to summarize the content of your newsletter.

  You may have noticed some special characters here such as “%20”, “%2F”. That’s because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend you to do so in order for your tracking not to break. Many tools are available on the web in order to encode your URLs such as https://www.urlencoder.org/.

  If you would like to access the previous tracking code easily, keep in mind that you can always find the tracking code generator within the “Matomo admin panel → Tracking code” :

  

  You can find more information about it on our guide at : How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon) ?

  As a result, the information will be pushed as following for any user who opens your email :

  

  To not bias your regular page views on your website with newsletter openings, we recommend tracking newsletter openings into a new website.

  Tracking even more data : the user ID example

  You can go deeper in your URL tracking by inserting other parameters such as the user id if you have this information within your emailing database. One of the main benefit of tracking the User ID is to connect data across multiple devices and browsers for a given user.

  You only need to add the following parameter &uid=XXX where XXX equals the dynamic value of the user ID :

  

  Make sure that UID from your emailing provider is the same as the one used on your website in order for your data to be consistent.

  Important note : some email providers are loading email messages by default which results in an opening even if the user did not actually open the email.

  Step 2 – Measure the clicks within your emailing

  Tracking clicks within an email lets you know with which content readers interacted the most. We recommend tracking all links in all your emails as a campaign, whether it is a newsletter, a custom support email, an email invoice, etc. You might be surprised to see which of your emails lead to conversions and if they don’t, try to tweak those emails, so they might in the future.

  Tracking clicks This works thanks to URL campaign tracking. In order to perform this action, you will need to add Matomo (Piwik) URL parameters to all your existing link URLs :

  • Website URL : for example “www.your-website.com”.
  • Campaign name : for example “pk_campaign=emailing”. Represents the name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • Campaign keyword : for example “pk_keyword=name-of-your-article”. Represents the name you would like to give to your content.
  • Campaign source : for example “pk_source=newsletter”. Represents the name of the referrer.
  • Campaign medium : for example “pk_medium=email”. Represents the type of referrer you are using.
  • Campaign content : for example “pk_content=title”. Represents the type of content.

  You can find more information about campaign url tracking in our “Tracking marketing campaigns with Matomo” guide.

  Here is a sample showing you how you can differentiate some links in a newsletter, all pointing to the same URL :

  

  Once you have added these URL parameters to each of your link, Matomo (Piwik) will clearly indicate the referrer of this specific campaign when a user clicks on a link in the newsletter and visits your website.

  Important note : if you do not track your campaigns, it will result in a bad interpretation of your data within Matomo (Piwik) as you will get webmail services or direct entries as referrer instead of your newsletter campaign.

  Step 3 – Measure emailing performances on your website

  Thanks to Matomo (Piwik) URL campaign parameters, you can now clearly identify the traffic brought through your emailing. You can now specifically isolate users who come from emails by creating a segment :

  

  Once done, you can either have a look at each user specifically through the visitor log report or analyze it as a whole within the rest of the reports.

  You can even measure your return on investment directly if goals have been defined. In order to know more about how to track goals within Matomo (Piwik).

  Did you like this article ?

  If you enjoyed reading this article, do not hesitate to share it around you. Moreover, if there are any topics you would like to write us about in particular, just drop us an email and we will be more than happy to write about it.

  The post How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• VP8 Codec Optimization Update

  16 juin 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther) — inside webm

  Since WebM launched in May, the team has been working hard to make the VP8 video codec faster. Our community members have contributed improvements, but there’s more work to be done in some interesting areas related to performance (more on those below).

  
  

  Encoder

  
  The VP8 encoder is ripe for speed optimizations. Scott LaVarnway’s efforts in writing an x86 assembly version of the quantizer will help in this goal significantly as the quantizer is called many times while the encoder makes decisions about how much detail from the image will be transmitted.

  For those of you eager to get involved, one piece of low-hanging fruit is writing a SIMD version of the ARNR temporal filtering code. Also, much of the assembly code only makes use of the SSE2 instruction set, and there surely are newer extensions that could be made use of. There are also redundant code removal and other general cleanup to be done ; (Yaowu Xu has submitted some changes for these).
  
  At a higher level, someone can explore some alternative motion search strategies in the encoder. Eventually the motion search can be decoupled entirely to allow motion fields to be calculated elsewhere (for example, on a graphics processor).
  

  Decoder

  
  Decoder optimizations can bring higher resolutions and smoother playback to less powerful hardware.

  Jeff Muizelaar has submitted some changes which combine the IDCT and summation with the predicted block into a single function, helping us avoid storing the intermediate result, thus reducing memory transfers and avoiding cache pollution. This changes the assembly code in a fundamental way, so we will need to sync the other platforms up or switch them to a generic C implementation and accept the performance regression. Johann Koenig is working on implementing this change for ARM processors, and we’ll merge these changes into the mainline soon.

  In addition, Tim Terriberry is attacking a different method of bounds checking on the "bool decoder." The bool decoder is performance-critical, as it is called several times for each bit in the input stream. The current code handles this check with a simple clamp in the innermost loops and a less-frequent copy into a circular buffer. This can be expensive at higher data rates. Tim’s patch removes the circular buffer, but uses a more complex clamp in the innermost loops. These inner loops have historically been troublesome on embedded platforms.
  
  To contribute in these efforts, I’ve started working on rewriting higher-level parts of the decoder. I believe there is an opportunity to improve performance by paying better attention to data locality and cache layout, and reducing memory bus traffic in general. Another area I plan to explore is improving utilization in the multi-threaded decoder by separating the bitstream decoding from the rest of the image reconstruction, using work units larger than a single macroblock, and not tying functionality to a specific thread. To get involved in these areas, subscribe to the codec-devel mailing list and provide feedback on the code as it’s written.
  

  Embedded Processors

  
  We want to optimize multiple platforms, not just desktops. Fritz Koenig has already started looking at the performance of VP8 on the Intel Atom platform. This platform need some attention as we wrote our current x86 assembly code with an out-of-order processor in mind. Since Atom is an in-order processor (much like the original Pentium), the instruction scheduling of all of the x86 assembly code needs to be reexamined. One option we’re looking at is scheduling the code for the Atom processor and seeing if that impacts the performance on other x86 platforms such as the Via C3 and AMD Geode. This is shaping up to be a lot of work, but doing it would provide us with an opportunity to tighten up our assembly code.
  
  These issues, along with wanting to make better use of the larger register file on x86_64, may reignite every assembly programmer’s (least ?) favorite debate : whether or not to use intrinsics. Yunqing Wang has been experimenting with this a bit, but initial results aren’t promising. If you have experience in dealing with a lot of assembly code across several similar-but-kinda-different platforms, these maintainability issues might be familiar to you. I hope you’ll share your thoughts and experiences on the codec-devel mailing list.
  
  Optimizing codecs is an iterative (some would say never-ending) process, so stay tuned for more posts on the progress we’re making, and by all means, start hacking yourself.
  
  It’s exciting to see that we’re starting to get substantial code contributions from developers outside of Google, and I look forward to more as WebM grows into a strong community effort.
  
  John Koleszar is a software engineer at Google.