Navigating the maze that is vendor-supplied evidence is one of the most time-consuming and frustrating tasks security teams face during the risk assessment process. Imagine spending countless hours chasing down security information from a vendor only to receive a mountain of dense, unstructured (sometimes contradictory) documents.
How can you possibly move forward?
Security analysts have long dealt with this very problem. If you’re in the industry, sifting through unorganized policy documents, audit reports, and certifications to extract key findings probably puts a bad taste in your mouth.
While untangling these knots of information, analysts must also fill in gaps, cross-reference their findings with other materials, and reformat everything to fit their organization’s control framework. Talk about a serious bottleneck.
This manual review process is time-consuming, prone to human error, and creates assessment delays that hinder critical decision-making—a reality security professionals are all too familiar with.
This article is part two of our blog series covering the most difficult challenges security teams face during the risk assessment process. In our last article, we tackled vendor responsiveness, and now we’re taking on the inefficiencies of evidence analysis.
Keep reading to learn how your security team can finally overcome this critical roadblock and harness UpGuard’s AI-powered Security Profiles to make sense of the chaos.
The Problem: Unstructured Documents and a Scenario Every Security Team Dreads
Let’s set the scene:
You’re back at your desk, drowning in the pile of vendor submissions that finally came through. You open the first file. It’s a long, dense policy manual that’s arduous to read. The sections aren’t labeled the way your organization needs them, and key information your team needs is sprinkled across 100 or so pages.
You hoped you could review the vendor evidence and move your assessments along quickly. But that doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the case. You essentially have to piece together a puzzle of information to find the insights you need. And this is just the first document in the stack and the first vendor your team needs to assess.
The hours start to pass. You’re making some progress, but it’s slow, and there’s no way you’re going to finish your review on time. Your team is already behind, and now you're wondering how to make sense of it all.
You spend hours reviewing and sorting through the vendor’s dense policy manual, only to realize you still don’t have all the answers you need.
You face the same bottleneck every review cycle. Your team is frustrated, you’re tired, and you know there has to be a better way to navigate this chaos.
“I feel like most of my time is sucked away to meaningless busy work. Granted, the work does have a meaning to it, but it’s mostly filling out sheets, staring at PDFs for a few hours, switching into a different project, and then logging off.”
The Solution: Evaluating Vendor Information with UpGuard
We get it. Sorting through unstructured evidence feels like searching for a needle in a haystack, but what if it didn’t have to?
What if you could instantly analyze, organize, and fill in information gaps without spending hours digging through documents?
Well, you’re in luck. UpGuard’s AI-powered security profiles make sense of the chaos, so you don’t have to.
Here’s how:
1. AI Document Analysis
We know vendor security and compliance documents can be a consistent bottleneck for security teams. Instead of spending hours deciphering these dense packets of information yourself, let UpGuard’s AI document analysis do the tedious work for you.
UpGuard Vendor Risk leverages advanced AI features to quickly analyze documents and map the findings against a pre-configured Security Profile. These advanced AI features identify control gaps, assess risks, and flag potential compliance concerns.
The best part?
All of this work just takes minutes. What once required days of manual effort is now automated, providing you with immediate insights into areas where a vendor’s security posture may fall short.
.jpg)
UpGuard’s Security Profiles are based on industry-leading security standards and cover the essential control checks of the two most popular security frameworks: ISO 27001:2022 and NIST CSF 2.0. This collection of best practices provides a robust foundation for organizations who need guidance on controls they should be assessing or those looking to develop formal vendor assessment programs. At the same time, UpGuard’s Security Profiles are detailed enough to be utilized by organizations that already adhere to the aforementioned security frameworks.
No matter where your organization is in its cybersecurity journey, you can adjust the scope of assessments to fit the nature of your vendor relationships and larger cybersecurity goals. Take virtually any piece of security evidence, scan it all in minutes, and get a very clear picture of your vendor’s security posture, including any critical gaps.
2. Focused Follow-Ups
Sometimes, vendor evidence still doesn’t give you all the answers. When you assess vendors manually, you only realize what’s missing hours after your assessment—but with UpGuard’s AI, missing or incomplete data is flagged almost immediately, allowing you to request the necessary details from vendors as soon as the analysis is complete. This ensures that your analysts know exactly where to focus their follow-up efforts, streamlining the process and reducing time spent to just a few mouse clicks.
Once vendors provide the requested data or additional evidence, the platform automatically updates the vendor’s Security Profile so your team can quickly access the most up-to-date information without manual intervention.
3. Automatic Risk Flagging
When you use the UpGuard platform to analyze vendor evidence, you don’t just identify control adherence—you also gain immediate insight into the associated risks when a control gap is found. This drastically reduces the time needed to pinpoint gaps and understand their potential impact and accelerates your risk-informed decision-making.
Every risk is flagged with essential information such as risk severity, detailed descriptions, and (when available) recommended remediation steps. This automated risk flagging ensures that no issues evade your detection, empowering your team to prioritise and address potential vulnerabilities efficiently and before they can cause harm to your organization.
4. Detailed Citations & Evidence Tagging
UpGuard’s AI ensures full transparency by providing detailed citations for every finding, showing exactly where the information originates—whether from a specific document section, vendor response, or a recognized security standard. This allows your team to quickly verify and validate each control check finding, giving you confidence in the analysis. Users also remain in control with the ability to reject specific citations or remove evidence from analysis at any time.
.jpg)
In addition to citations, every piece of vendor evidence is centrally stored and tagged with critical insights, such as the source location, who uploaded it, document type, and expiration dates. This evidence tagging further enhances your team’s transparency and organization, making it easy to track the details behind every finding.
These citations and tags create a clear audit trail for collaboration with vendors, internal stakeholders, or regulatory bodies.
Overcome Critical Evidence Analysis Challenges with UpGuard Vendor Risk
Ready to automate evidence analysis once and for all?
Book your free UpGuard demo today, and check our exclusive, on-demand AI webinar to learn more about UpGuard’s AI features.
This article was part two of our five-part blog series covering the toughest challenges security teams face. In our next article, we’ll discuss how to improve the efficiency of vendor remediation requests.
