Inefficiencies, like slow vendor responses, often plague security teams like a persistent headache. At first, it’s just a dull throb in the background. Yes, it’s annoying, but analysts often accept it as the way things are, pushing through the pain and getting the job done. However, over time, this headache intensifies.
Before long, your largest vendors are deflecting questionnaire requests with incomplete responses, dragging their feet for weeks, or even refusing your team’s requests entirely. The worst part is that these roadblocks don’t just test your team’s patience; they expose your organization to prolonged risk by delaying assessments and creating critical security gaps.
Without timely, complete, and context-rich security responses, you and your analysts are left keeping your organization afloat in a sea of uncertainty. And just like a headache, if left untreated, this lack of vendor responsiveness can snowball into something more painful.
The exact cost may be hard to quantify. But at the very least, we’re talking about increased risks, wasted resources, and no clear answers. It’s also likely that your personnel will begin to suffer, meaning burnout, turnover, poor job satisfaction, and reduced effectiveness will become real possibilities. The last thing you want is to send your security team into a full-blown crisis. We can all agree that’s not good for business.
When it comes to surfacing critical vendor information, there’s a better way than depending solely on vendor responsiveness. UpGuard Vendor Risk and its suite of AI-powered features help security teams reclaim their autonomy, soothe their third-party headaches, and significantly increase their efficiency.
The Problem: Vendor Delays and a Scenario Every Security Team Dreads
Let’s set the scene:
You work at a large financial institution, and your security team has just started completing vendor risk assessments for the upcoming year. It’s a routine task. One that should be efficient and well-run since your team completes these assessments annually. But it never is.
It begins innocently enough. You're tasked with assessing the security posture of your top three cloud service providers. These are major vendors—big names in the industry and the ones you rely on for everything from data storage to email servers. You send over the initial security questionnaire and wait for their responses.
But then the clock starts ticking. Days pass. And then weeks. You follow up with the vendors, nudging them for the necessary information. You know at least one of these vendors won’t respond at all (maybe all three), so you have to resort to pulling the necessary information from their website’s trust page to review manually.
As the weeks drag on, your frustration builds. Each interaction throughout this process leaves you and your team drained and frustrated. The response time is so slow that you can’t proceed with your assessments.
Meanwhile, your manager is asking for status updates. The internal audit team is breathing down her neck. And you all know that every delay increases your organization’s exposure to potential security risks.
“Our biggest problems are the large vendors who don’t conform to our questionnaires and send us a dense packet of information. FIS, FISA, Microsoft, Bloomberg. You know, all the big ugly animals.”
The Solution: Surfacing Vendor Information with UpGuard
What if you could bypass this endless game of tag and say “goodbye” to incomplete responses and the constant uncertainty?
What if your team could stop scrambling for vendor data and instead focus on what really matters—securing your organization and driving informed decisions?
That’s where UpGuard Vendor Risk steps in, revolutionizing how (and how fast) security teams gather vital vendor information:
1. Automated Vendor Evidence Sourcing
One of the biggest pain points surrounding third-party risk management is manually chasing down vendor evidence. However, with UpGuard, a good portion of the information is already sourced for you, leaving you with less to track down from vendors.
The UpGuard platform automatically scans vendors’ publicly available data and uses that to build a real-time security profile. These scans, combined with the platform’s automated daily external attack surface scanning (which can cover up to 30% of the profile), allow it to collect a diverse array of vendor information, such as security audits and certifications, industry reports, and other key data points—all without relying on responses. This means you and your team can get a detailed, accurate, and up-to-date overview of your vendors’ security posture without relying on or waiting for vendors to cooperate.
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UpGuard also makes it easy for users to upload additional vendor-sourced evidence, creating a comprehensive and centralized repository. Within the platform, you can tag vendor evidence with relevant information, such as document type, expiration date, and sourced location. These tags make specific evidence easy to find and are essential for compliance and ensuring your organization remains audit-ready.
2. AI-Powered Security Document Analysis
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UpGuard knows vendor security, data privacy, and policy documents can be overwhelming. They’re lengthy, complex, and sometimes contradictory. Instead of wasting hours trying to sift through these documents, UpGuard’s AI document analysis does the heavy lifting for you.
Harnessing advanced AI features, our platform analyzes documents to uncover control gaps, determine risk, and identify compliance issues in minutes. What once took days of manual labor is now automated and incredibly fast, giving you instant insights into areas where a vendor’s security posture may be lacking.
The UpGuard Security Profile’s controls and risk categories were built off standards taken from leading frameworks, and fully cover the required checks of the two most popular security frameworks: ISO 27001:2022 and NIST CSF 2.0. This compilation of industry best practices creates the perfect starting point for security teams looking to build a robust vendor assessment framework. Your team can even customize these controls to suit different third-party relationships and vendors across all criticality tiers.
3. Focused Vendor Engagement with Gap Questionnaires
With UpGuard, your focus can shift from sending exhaustive questionnaires to only asking what’s needed to fill the gaps. Once UpGuard identifies control gaps across a vendor’s Security Profile, it generates a gap questionnaire—a short set of targeted questions that focus on areas where you need more information to evaluate a vendor’s security posture.
Vendors, especially those inundated with questionnaire requests, are far more likely to answer five targeted questions than the 100 or more questions found in a traditional questionnaire. Not only does this improve your chances of getting the responses you need, but it also helps vendors identify where their security posture may be falling short. This transparency is an excellent way to create a collaborative relationship with your critical vendors rather than one that’s adversarial.
4. Scale Without Sacrificing Quality
Vendor ecosystems are growing, which means the volume of risk assessments just keeps increasing. With UpGuard, you can scale your TPRM program without sacrificing accuracy or efficiency. Whether your third-party network includes 50 vendors or over 5,000, UpGuard ensures that every assessment follows the same repeatable, consistent process. This consistency helps your team stay on top of assessments, even when the workload grows.
Overcome Critical Third-Party Headaches With UpGuard Vendor Risk
Ready to revolutionize how your team sources vendor information?
Book your free UpGuard demo today, and check out our exclusive, on-demand AI webinar to learn more about UpGuard’s AI features.
This article was part one of our five-part blog series covering the toughest challenges security teams face. In our next article, we’ll discuss how to improve your team’s evidence analysis process.
