The 2025 Universal Compliance Checklist: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA in One Framework

Most organizations treat SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA as three separate projects — but nearly 70% of their requirements overlap. Each framework asks the same core question: Can you prove that your organization consistently protects data? By mapping shared controls and centralizing documentation, companies can meet all three standards using one compliance checklist.

Modern compliance teams now take a “build once, apply many times” approach. Instead of duplicating audits, they align every policy, control, and evidence item to a unified control library.
One compliance checklist can satisfy multiple frameworks when controls are mapped to a shared foundation.

How Do SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA Overlap?

Although these frameworks serve different audiences — customers, regulators, and patients — they rely on similar control themes. The differences lie primarily in vocabulary and depth of implementation.

Shared Control Domains Across All Three Frameworks

• Access Management: Role-based access control, MFA, and quarterly access reviews.

• Asset & Data Classification: Identifying sensitive data and labeling it appropriately.

• Logging & Monitoring: Recording user activity and reviewing alerts regularly.

• Change Management: Documenting system updates and testing before deployment.

• Vendor Risk Management: Assessing third-party security posture and maintaining agreements.

• Encryption & Key Management: Protecting data at rest and in transit.

• Backup & Business Continuity: Maintaining recovery plans and testing them annually.

• Security Awareness Training: Ensuring employees understand and follow security best practices.

SOC 2 calls these Trust Services Criteria, ISO 27001 calls them Annex A Controls, and HIPAA groups them under Administrative, Technical, and Physical Safeguards. The underlying intent — protecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability — is the same.

SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA share one foundation: governance, access, and proof of control.

What Are the Universal Controls Every Company Needs?

A universal compliance checklist focuses on controls that satisfy the most common audit requirements across frameworks. Implementing these controls early builds a foundation that supports future certifications. To see how these map, refer to SOC 2 Best Practices 2025.

The 2025 Universal Compliance Checklist

• Identity & Access Management: Enforce SSO and MFA, review access quarterly.

• Logging & Alerting: Centralized logs with alerts for privileged actions.

• Data Encryption: AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, with defined key rotation policies.

• Vendor Risk: Maintain vendor inventory, data mapping, risk ratings, and signed contracts or BAAs.

• Incident Response: Document playbooks, escalation paths, and testing logs.

• Business Continuity: Test backups, define RTO/RPO, and maintain DR runbooks.

• Policy Management: Maintain version-controlled Access Control, DR, and Encryption policies.

• Employee Training: Conduct annual security awareness and phishing simulations.

• Change Management: Track pull requests, approvals, and rollback procedures.

• Evidence Collection: Automate screenshots, configurations, and reports in one system.

Organizations covering these ten areas are 70% audit-ready for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA simultaneously.
Universal controls create efficiency — one implementation, multiple certifications.

How Does Automation Simplify Multi-Framework Audits?

Manually maintaining compliance across frameworks quickly becomes unmanageable. Each update requires new screenshots, policy versions, and cross-references. Automation solves this by linking controls, evidence, and frameworks into one real-time system. Discover more about this in our article on Using AI to Shorten Compliance Cycles.

How Audit Automation Helps

• Control Mapping: Connects one policy or control to multiple frameworks simultaneously.

• Evidence Synchronization: Automatically updates evidence across all standards when one change occurs.

• Drift Detection: Alerts teams when a control or configuration falls out of compliance.

• Central Reporting: Generates audit-ready reports for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA from the same data set.

Teams using automation platforms like DSALTA reduce audit prep time by 60%+ and eliminate redundant tasks, while maintaining a single source of truth for all compliance evidence.

Audit automation turns overlapping frameworks into a single, efficient workflow.

When Should Companies Expand from One Framework to Many?

The right time to layer frameworks depends on customer demands and market growth. Startups often begin with SOC 2 for credibility, then expand to ISO 27001 for enterprise deals, and add HIPAA when handling health data.

A unified control foundation allows organizations to scale easily without repeating audits or rewriting documentation. By maintaining a single control library and shared evidence repository, new frameworks become extensions — not new projects.

Multi-framework expansion works best when you’ve already built a shared compliance backbone.

The Bottom Line

Compliance frameworks may speak different languages, but they share one message: protect data, prove it, and keep improving. A single, well-structured checklist aligned with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA eliminates duplication, accelerates audits, and ensures lasting readiness.

Simplify multi-framework compliance with DSALTA’s unified checklist — one platform for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA readiness.

Book a DSALTA walkthrough to see how automation can unify your compliance frameworks, or explore the DSALTA platform overview for an inside look at AI-driven control mapping.