How Infrastructure Supports PCI DSS and SOC 2 Compliance in Financial Services

Financial institutions operate on trust. Customers expect their data, transactions, and assets to be protected at all times.

Infrastructure plays a critical role in that, but for many financial leaders, understanding how PCI DSS and SOC 2 apply across their systems – and where their infrastructure provider fits in – isn’t always straightforward. 

Key takeaways

• PCI DSS ensures secure handling of cardholder data, while SOC 2 ensures service providers safeguard systems and information.
• PCI DSS is mandatory for organizations that process, store, or transmit credit card data. SOC 2 is voluntary but often essential for vendor trust.
• Infrastructure providers support compliance by securing underlying systems, monitoring, and maintaining audit-ready environments.
• Financial institutions should prioritize vendor due diligence, regular audits, encryption practices, and incident response plans.
• Choosing the right infrastructure partner reduces risk, improves resilience, and strengthens compliance posture.

What PCI DSS and SOC 2 mean for your infrastructure

PCI DSS requires systems that handle cardholder data to be secured and segmented from the rest of your environment. Infrastructure providers offering environments aligned with PCI DSS requirements support controls like network segmentation, intrusion detection, and patch management.

For a financial leader, this means your technical team can focus  more on application-level security and payment workflows, while relying on the provider for infrastructure-level controls.

SOC 2 covers broad operational controls. For financial organizations, this matters because every vendor—whether a cloud host, CRM, or SaaS platform—can become a weak link. SOC 2 reports provide assurance that your infrastructure provider has documented, tested, and audited processes for protecting your systems and your customers’ sensitive data.

What’s the difference between PCI DSS and SOC 2?

PCI DSS and SOC 2 overlap in areas like security, monitoring, and access controls, but they solve different problems. PCI DSS is a mandatory, prescriptive standard for handling cardholder data. SOC 2 is a voluntary, attestation-based audit that demonstrates broader organizational trustworthiness.

Aspect	PCI DSS	SOC 2
Purpose	Protect cardholder data	Validate trust in data management practices
Scope	Payment processing environments	Broader IT systems and vendor operations
Mandatory?	Yes, if handling card data	No, but often required in vendor contracts
Framework type	Prescriptive technical requirements	Attestation against Trust Services Criteria
Audience	Card brands, acquirers, regulators	Customers, partners, vendors

Best practices for working with infrastructure providers to support compliance

Meeting PCI DSS and SOC 2 requirements isn’t a one-time project. It requires structured processes, the right hosting infrastructure, and ongoing vigilance.

Here’s how to evaluate whether an infrastructure provider can support your compliance requirements, and where your responsibilities remain the same.

1. Vendor due diligence

In general, vendor due diligence is the process of evaluating third-party partners to ensure they meet your organization’s security, financial, and operational standards. For financial institutions, this is critical because regulators often hold you responsible for risks created by your vendors. 

Due diligence involves reviewing contracts, certifications, policies, and ongoing performance.

In infrastructure environments, due diligence means digging into how a provider manages data centers, networking, and security operations.

• Ask for PCI DSS Attestation of Compliance (AOC) and a current SOC 2 report. 
• Evaluate the infrastructure provider’s track record: uptime guarantees, whether they employ 24/7 monitoring, etc.

Financial institutions should insist on transparency around data center locations, physical security, and redundancy measures, since these directly impact compliance and resilience.

2. Regular audits and monitoring

At the organizational level, regular audits and monitoring are how companies validate that their policies and controls are working.

• Audits can be internal reviews or independent third-party assessments. 
• Monitoring is the continuous process of watching systems, logs, and activities for signs of weaknesses or breaches.

Together, they prevent compliance from becoming a one-time event and instead turn it into a living discipline.

When it comes to infrastructure, audits and monitoring should extend into your provider’s responsibilities.

• Infrastructure partners should supply regular reports on patch management, vulnerability scans, and intrusion detection. 
• Financial institutions should ensure log data from hosted environments integrates with their SIEM (security information and event management) tools for centralized oversight.

Ideally, infrastructure contracts should include real-time alerting on suspicious activities. This makes audits less painful and gives regulators confidence in your monitoring posture. These controls support your compliance audits, but do not replace your internal audit responsibilities.

3. Encryption and secure key management

Across industries, encryption is the bedrock of protecting sensitive data. It ensures that even if attackers gain access to files or communications, the information is unreadable without the proper keys. 

Secure key management is the other half of the equation, involving how encryption keys are generated, stored, rotated, and revoked. Weak key management undermines even the strongest encryption.

In infrastructure environments, encryption should cover both data in transit (such as TLS/SSL for web traffic) and data at rest (databases, storage volumes, backups). Infrastructure providers that specialize in financial services typically offer built-in disk-level encryption, encrypted backups, and managed SSL/TLS. 

But encryption is only as strong as the key management system. Look for providers that use Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) or secure vault systems for key storage. Financial leaders should verify whether the infrastructure provider’s team or your internal team controls the keys, since this determines who holds ultimate responsibility under compliance audits.

“Think of encryption as the vault door — but without proper key management, you’re leaving the keys under the mat.” – Anthony Anachuna, Business Development Representative

4. Incident response protocols

Incident response, at a high level, is the structured process organizations use to detect, contain, and recover from security breaches or system failures. 

For regulated industries like finance, regulators often require documented incident response plans and periodic testing. A strong protocol reduces downtime, limits data loss, and helps prove due diligence during post-incident investigations.

At the infrastructure level, Incident response is about what happens when something goes wrong in your servers or data centers. 

Infrastructure providers should have a 24/7 security operations center (SOC) that can identify anomalies, escalate alerts, and execute recovery actions. Financial institutions should ensure their own incident response plan is aligned with their Infrastructure provider’s escalation paths. Ask questions like: 

• Who notifies us if a server is compromised? 
• How fast are incidents escalated? 
• How are forensic logs preserved for investigations?

Infrastructure providers with tested response playbooks, combined with your internal teams, create a joint defense that auditors and regulators expect.

Next steps for ensuring PCI DSS and SOC 2 compliance

Compliance is more than a checkbox. It’s a safeguard for customer trust, a shield against breaches, and a competitive edge in vendor relationships. Financial institutions that invest in compliance-ready infrastructure strengthen resilience and reduce regulatory risk.

Your next step is to assess where your current infrastructure supports compliance and where gaps still exist. Review your infrastructure environment and vendor contracts. Confirm whether your current provider holds a valid PCI DSS Attestation of Compliance (AOC) and SOC 2 reports, and whether their controls map to your internal compliance requirements.

Even with the right provider, compliance remains a shared responsibility between your infrastructure, applications, and internal processes.

If you’re evaluating infrastructure providers, look for environments designed specifically for regulated workloads – where compliance, security, and performance are built into the foundation rather than added later.

Nexcess provides infrastructure environments aligned with PCI DSS requirements and backed by SOC 2 audited controls. With advanced encryption, managed firewalls, DDoS protection, and 24/7 monitoring, our platform supports financial institutions in meeting compliance requirements – while maintaining the performance needed for real-time systems.

Financial services compliance FAQ