Responding to security reviews is an onerous, but necessary, part of business. If your company acts as a third party vendor to other organizations, you must face several due diligence requests every week, and a series of manual, repetitive tasks to complete them.
The biggest problem is, this vendor security response process to comply with enterprise risk assessments is rarely a straightforward process. Vendors answer the same questions and provide the same security documentation over and over again —be it a SIG Lite, a SOC report, a pentest, etc. To ease this pain, ThirdPartyTrust has released a free strategy guide titled ‘Responding to Security Reviews Faster: A vendor’s guide to simplifying compliance with risk assessments’.
The guide is available for free download, and both introduces the most common struggle with the manual approach to vendor risk assessments, and connects those problems to tried and true solutions.
Click on the image to download our free guide
If your business is on the receiving end of a vendor risk management request, our practical guide for third party vendors is ideal to reduce the time spent answering due diligence requests. If emails and spreadsheets with hundreds of security questions seem familiar, read on to discover how to free up time by eliminating repetitive tasks, reduce friction between Sales and Security, and build trust with customers early on in the sales cycle.
Our strategy guide covers:
- The struggles of the manual security response process
- The 3 biggest pain points for third party vendors
- How to simplify compliance with security reviews
The problem with responding to security reviews manually
For years, the process of assessing and representing third party risk has been as manual and repetitive as it has been necessary to do business in the modern world. Enterprises struggle to build scalable workflows to assess hundreds of third party vendors every year, while vendors (such as yourself) are forced to respond in a one-off manner. As a result, the traditional approach to third party risk management (TPRM) has been highly dependent on manual entry of emails and spreadsheets: an overly complicated trail of time-consuming and resource-intensive work for both sides, failing to effectively leverage previous work and prioritize efficiency.
As a result, vendors like you spend valuable resources answering gigantic spreadsheets with security questions every week. These questionnaires range anywhere from 40 to 400 questions to assess your security policies and procedures, which is a compliance mandate for enterprises, but a killer for any small to medium-sized GRC team. In addition, its one-off nature makes it impossible to scale, as there’s a limit in the amount of questionnaires the same team can answer in a given week.
Even highly trained members of your team (or just those who are proficient at copying/pasting) spend hours of their week performing repetitive tasks while your business must tend to other essential duties.
When adding up this sunk time, your business must also address how much friction it causes between your sales and security teams. Likewise, management loses control and insight as lines of communication multiply and drag on. As a result, we wonder:
- How much time does your team spend responding to one-off security questionnaires? (Probably too much)
- How many times were you asked for a SIG Lite or a pentest this year? (Could be dozens of times a month)
- How much time is spent waiting for an NDA to be signed? (Hours turn to days)
If you have experienced any of these struggles, you are not alone. There are solutions and best practices available for you to simplify and scale your security response process while overcoming the most common struggles that plague TPRM.
