Auditors do not want your policy. They want an artefact.

Disclosure: I work on an access tool (Tessera), mentioned once at the end. Everything before that is about evidence, and applies whatever you use. The most common surprise in a first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit is not that a control is missing. It is that a control exists, works, and cannot be evidenced — so it counts as absent. The distinction is worth stating precisely, because it is not obvious until it has cost you something. A control is a thing that is true about your system. Only authorised engineers can reach production. Evidence is an artefact, produced by a system rather than by a person, that demonstrates the control was operating throughout the audit period — not on the day someone checked. Most organisations have decent controls. Most cannot produce evidence, because their controls live in places that do not emit artefacts: a bastion's authorized_keys file, a spreadsheet, a Slack thread where someone approved something, and the collective memory of three engineers. What gets asked for Reconstructed from what people have told me, this is the shape of the questions: "Show me everyone who could access production on 14 March." Not today. A specific date in the past, usually chosen by the auditor. This is the one that catches people, because most systems can tell you the current state and cannot tell you a historical one. authorized_keys has no history. A spreadsheet has whatever history git gives it, if it is in git, which it usually is not. "Show me that this person's access ended when their employment ended." Both timestamps, from two systems, matched. HR has the first. The second is the problem. "Show me the approval for this elevated access." Not that a policy requires approval — the specific approval, for this specific grant, with who approved it and when. "Show me what was done in this session." Increasingly common where production access to customer data is involved. Not "we log commands", but the actual record for a named session. "Show me that these c