Introducing Document Sharing Management For Your Next Security Review

We’re happy to introduce Document Sharing Management, yet another feature to make sharing your security posture easier. As a vendor to other organizations, Beacon by ThirdPartyTrust now allows you to add a custom document, such as an NDA, when sharing your security profile with your customers.

How does Document Sharing Management work?

As you may know, Beacon is our platform for third-parties that need to answer due diligence requests from their customers. Instead of starting from scratch on every assessment and answering the same questions over and over again, Beacon allows you to create and send invitations to your customers to review a centralized security profile.

This Beacon profile may include your latest questionnaires, certifications, insurances and attestations, with the ability to notify your customers when there’s new evidence uploaded or updated. We are helping vendors proactively respond to security questionnaires with a forward-thinking approach that goes beyond processing every new spreadsheet a customer sends.

As a Beacon subscriber, thanks to the new Document Sharing Management feature, you can now add additional custom documents to your security profile. This development follows a quite common use case of our customers, which is uploading a custom non disclosure agreement (NDA) as a preliminary requirement to your profile.

However, this feature has the flexibility to allow for other custom types of documents that you deem necessary to share, such as contracts or policies. The rich text editor provides for endless possibilities!

The best part is this is a flexible feature that you can switch on or off when sharing your profile. You only need to create your document once, and then use it for any opportunity you want. Our mission is to make third-party risk assessments easier for both enterprises and third-parties, so this is an additional resource that Beacon provies to build and customize your response process.

What documents apply? 

The documents that can be shared via this new feature may be informative or may require some action from the receiver, like completing mandatory fields or accepting terms. 

A great use case for this new feature are Non Disclosure Agreements. NDAs are an important contracting tool to ensure any nonpublic information exchanged between a vendor and an organization is being protected.

The NDA signing process is often a struggle for sales, legal, procurement and information security teams as they try to move down the sales cycle. There’s a legal aspect to security assessments that involves determining who should be able to access the information, and under what contractual conditions. Having this step built into the security response process is a big win for third-parties!

Nonetheless, this feature is flexible enough that you may also include any other additional documentation, such as onboarding information, company awareness data, and basically any other message you may choose to include, which may or may not have mandatory fields. 

It really is a simple process

This new feature will allow you to simply create your documentation once, from your profile settings, including text and additional fields, which can individually selected as mandatory or not, to provide top customizable features. 

Your customers will see them upon accepting to view your data. This new feature includes a simple Audit Trail, allowing you to review actions taken from your receiver. Plus you and your customer will be emailed a PDF copy of the documentation for the records.

This Document Management feature follows our recent launch of the Selective Sharing functionality, which also streamlines and customizes the process of responding to security assessments. It essentially allows you to choose which of the documents uploaded in your profile you want to share in each customer connection. The best part is that you can enable Selective Sharing and Document Sharing independently!

At ThirdPartyTrust we truly believe that one size does not fit all, and therefore we strive to fine-tune the Beacon security profile sharing options in response to customer feedback and understanding of their pain points.

Not all customers may request the same questionnaires or certifications, so you need to be able to customize your response accordingly. And we’re here to help!