Security Questionnaires: Assessing and Managing Vendor Risks
The process of assessing a third party’s security risk, including a risk assessment questionnaire and evidence collection, is not easy. Often an already complicated process is muddled with day-to-day activities like working with your third parties to reply in a timely and accurate manner without losing track of all the requests you sent.
Because of this complicated process, your organization should establish processes and guidelines including how to gather data, review answers and remediate pending issues. In addition to putting these processes and guidelines in place, selecting a questionnaire and evidence collection technology solution can also help streamline the process.
This technology can assist in
- Simplifying data collection
- Organizing evidence attachments
- In-context reviews
- Follow ups
Without a clear process and useful technology to assist in your questionnaire and evidence collection, it can be easy to quickly become burdened with constant emails and consulting multiple sources where data is collected, analyzed, and remediated.
Why Security Questionnaires Still Matter in 2025
Security questionnaires remain a foundational part of third-party risk management (TPRM), even as automation and real-time monitoring tools grow in prominence. These questionnaires enable organizations to collect structured data about a vendor’s security controls, governance practices, compliance certifications, and incident response capabilities.
In 2025, digital supply chains are more interconnected than ever. Cloud platforms, SaaS vendors, and managed services all introduce potential vulnerabilities. Over one-third of breaches stem from compromised vendors or third-parties, according to SecurityScorecard’s 2025 Global Third Party Breach Report.
A single compromised vendor can create a ripple effect across hundreds of customers. Security questionnaires can help organizations proactively identify weak links before they become breach entry points.
When security teams design and implement questionnaires effectively, they can provide a standardized method for:
- Gathering detailed security and compliance information
- Evaluating vendor maturity against industry benchmarks
- Ensuring accountability and legal defensibility
- Supporting procurement and contracting decisions
- Measuring improvement over time
To assist you in this process, we’ve put together 6 best practices for conducting your third party risk assessment questionnaires and evidence collection.
1. How to start gaining visibility into your third parties
The best place to start is by researching common problems and typical security breaches in the vendor’s sector to better evaluate the related risk.
One way to gain insight into these issues on a continuous basis is by using an automated security monitoring tool. These tools can not only help you communicate better with your vendors about potential risk, but also keep an eye out for risk areas and help determine your key risk indicators.
2. How to find the best assessment questionnaire in cybersecurity
After researching your vendor landscape, and your organization’s needs, you should decide whether you will be using a standard assessment questionnaire (such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO, NIST) or a custom questionnaire.
Standard assessment questionnaires are curated to fit regulations or specific industry trends to assess different areas of privacy or security risk, so they are a great starting point. However, the need for specific answers and more control often leads teams to build custom questionnaires. Custom questionnaires can be complicated because they force vendors to answer both standard and custom questions, which causes more work as third parties may not be able to leverage existing answers.
Regardless of what questionnaire you use, you should be aware that your third party vendor has probably filled out some compliance questionnaires in the past, and you could consider allowing your vendors to leverage these answers using tools that will allow vendors to translate answers from one questionnaire into another.
3. How to monitor and review questionnaires to keep vendors on track
It can be easy to get lost in the back and forth or even bury questionnaire assessments when no progress is being made. It is important to continuously monitor and review the progress vendors are making on questionnaires to see if there are roadblocks in the process and where you can aid in helping them answer efficiently. Allow third parties to reach out if they have any concerns over your questions or the evidence that you are requiring and make sure to keep that well documented as part of the process.
In addition to creating a healthy check-in process, we also recommend you set a clear deadline for assessment completion. This way both you and the vendor can work towards a common goal.
4. Use technology to streamline the process
Risk assessment questionnaires are not new. You’ve probably been sending most questionnaires by email and managing excel spreadsheets to check for answers. However, technology could give a boost to your process and help you to better track answers and remediate items. The right tool can help you give your third-party vendors:
- A way to provide answers, evidence and any questions they may have in an environment that makes it easy to collaborate.
- A way to delegate answers within their organizations, so you get the correct expert answers for each area.
- A quick way to remediate and discuss issues, where you can review evidence in the context of each question’s answers, making the process more efficient.
The easier the tool is to navigate, the more time you can spend working to reduce risks with vendors and not be focused on the nitty gritty of data collection.
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5. Verify and validate data
After the answers have been collected, the next step is to verify and validate the data. In our experience, we have found that while internal validation is important, external validation is crucial. One great way to get external validation of your data is to use an automated tool, which can help quickly identify problem areas and assist in difficult remediation discussions. It is important to keep track of questions that might be high risk or controversial, so we suggest having a mechanism to tag or flag questions that will need more in-depth discussion, or internal review.
6. Provide questionnaire and assessment feedback
Finally, as you get ready to close an assessment, it is important to have control over what the third party vendors ultimately submit. This means being able to send back a questionnaire easily that does not meet the requirements, or the ability to close out the process and approve the assessment. At the end of every assessment, you should create a report on the findings and pending issues for remediation to provide with your team.
Common Challenges with Traditional Questionnaires
Although questionnaires can be incredibly revealing of third-party cybersecurity maturity, many organizations still struggle with the inefficiencies and limitations of legacy questionnaire processes. Challenges include:
- Low response rates or delayed replies from vendors
- Inconsistent formats and frameworks, which reduce comparability
- Manual scoring and analysis, creating resource bottlenecks
- Outdated responses, which do not reflect current risk posture
- Lack of integration with continuous monitoring and remediation workflows
These limitations and manual processes can obscure true risk exposure and cause organizations to rely on incomplete or stale data during critical vendor decisions.
Risk assessments can quickly become overwhelming when done at scale. The better your process and organization skills, the easier it will be to gather those assessments quickly and painlessly. The 6 tips mentioned above, are geared towards streamlining the process and empowering you to focus on the relevant details.
New tools have emerged that can help make this entire process easier and make sure the time spent coordinating goes towards analyzing and remediating any issues instead. SecurityScorecards’ Security Assessments can help organizations reduce the amount of time spent on questionnaires with customizable vendor questionnaires, automated validation, and streamlined monitoring.
Final thoughts on third-party risk management
Security questionnaires remain a vital component of third-party risk management because they offer structured, self-attested insights into a vendor’s security posture, governance maturity, and compliance standing. When thoughtfully designed and aligned with industry frameworks like NIST or ISO/IEC 27001, questionnaires can help provide legal defensibility and help organizations standardize due diligence across complex vendor ecosystems.
As digital supply chains grow more interconnected and threat actors increasingly target third-parties, relying on questionnaires alone is no longer sufficient. That’s where real-time monitoring and solutions like SecurityScorecard’s Supply Chain Detection and Response (SCDR) come in.
By integrating questionnaire data with continuous risk intelligence, organizations can gain a more complete and actionable view of third-party risk. The combination of proactive assessments and real-time monitoring enables security teams to:
- Move from periodic audits to continuous oversight
- Improve incident response readiness
- Help ensure vendor accountability throughout the contract lifecycle
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