For many InfoSec teams, most day-to-day operations are focused around a single area: vendor risk management. Over the last few years, building a safe, scalable, and accessible vendor environment has become a top priority for any organization that is sharing or opening up data with customers, partners, or vendors. Because so much time and effort is spent on this single area of focus, it has become increasingly crucial for InfoSec teams to develop strategic processes and workflows to help streamline vendor risk management and make it more efficient.

Creating a more efficient vendor assessment process

1. Automate, automate, automate!

If your team spends precious time gathering answers, responding to questionnaire requests, and reviewing incoming assessments, know that it doesn’t have to be this way. By setting up automated solutions to review incoming assessments and assessment requests, your team can pull in repeatable answers to eliminate the need to answer the same questions over and over repeatedly, flag responses that need deeper review instead of manual reading through each assessment, and generally be more efficient with where you focus your time.

2. Set your internal and external stakeholders up for success.

Unfortunately, sales and other departments rely heavily on InfoSec to give the green light when it comes time to move forward with vendor deals. This means some vendor deals can be roadblocked while vendor risk is assessed. To eliminate these roadblocks and give other stakeholders the tools they need to succeed, look for ways to equip these resources with the access and documentation they need. This means sharing your security posture with vendor InfoSec teams early in the sales process and giving your sales team access to security documentation and information.

3. Leverage cloud-based technology and tools.

If you’re still relying on spreadsheets to review and complete vendor assessments, you’re doing it wrong! Spreadsheets can lead to manual error, which can be deadly in vendor risk management. Instead, your team should look to cloud-based technology and solutions to ensure you work at the highest possible caliber level. Instead of worrying about if you’re accessing the most up-to-date content and reports, a cloud-based file system allows your team to instantly access accurate assessment information at all times.

Whistic can help you say goodbye to spreadsheets

Building an automated, efficient vendor assessment process helps more than just your InfoSec team. Your sales team can push deals through the pipeline faster, vendors can streamline their internal workflows, and your entire organization can be more confident in the safety and scalability of operations.

With Whistic, your InfoSec team can move beyond spreadsheets and truly take advantage of the modern world of vendor risk management. Whistic gives modern InfoSec teams the ability to scale vendor assessments without sacrificing compliance, give other teams secure access to security documentation, and track vendor assessments from start to finish. You can learn more and get started here.