SOC 2 Definitions 1 slide-12

Different Levels of Service Abstraction

A minor problem is that what is affected by the service need not be the service requester or belong to the requester. The more serious deficiency is that the definition only refers to a service instance.

There is the general service,
the service offered by a particular provider,
and the service instance as requested by a consumer.

A car rental service is a general service, perhaps offered by several different companies.

The Hertz car rental service is a particular service.

When I rent from Hertz, that is an instance of this particular service.

The Hill'77 definition only addresses the service instance.
But we need to be able to define a general service of a type, define a particular service, as well as define a service instance.
So, we introduce the notion of roles in our definition.