While business partnerships require trust, security requires verification. In a world where business relies on data security, vendor risk management is mission-critical to financial success. Organizations rely on vendor security assessment questionnaires as part of their due diligence processes. However, manual questionnaire processes are burdensome and time-consuming, so many organizations are turning to automation to reduce operational costs. Security questionnaire automation best practices can help streamline processes for more efficient risk management.
Library Structure
Functionally, any document repository should be easily searchable. If you’ve ever worked with cloud shared drives, you know that searching for documents can be time-consuming. As you build out the library structure for your questionnaire automation, you should consider:
- Filename conventions
- File status tracking
- File description use cases
- File categorization
- Sortability
User Permissions
Automation should be a way to enhance internal and external collaboration. However, security questionnaires may contain sensitive information so you need to set roles and permissions when you set up the repository. The permissions should limit user access according to the principle of least privilege.
Some examples of sensitive information include:
- Audit documentation
- Penetration testing documentation
- Security certifications
- Security controls
The highly sensitive nature of these internal documents means that you need to place user access controls around who can access the automated tool and what they can do within it. Some considerations include:
- What job function needs to access the questionnaires?
- What type of access do the users need to complete their job functions (edit/read/comment)?
- What devices need to access the repository?
- Where do the users need to access the questionnaires from?
Secure communications
Collaboration between customer and vendor is important. Customers often need to ask their vendors questions, and the vendors need to reply. However, using email not only becomes cumbersome but it can be intercepted by threat actors.
Your security automation solution should provide an easy and secure way to enable these conversations. You want to make sure that any communications remain confidential, often trying to keep them within your solution.
Scheduling
While it would be nice if questionnaires were a one-and-done event, compliance mandates increasingly focus on organizations engaging in continuous monitoring as part of vendor risk management. This means that you should be reviewing your vendors’ security posture at least annually.
To maintain compliance, you should make sure that you establish processes for engaging informal reviews. As part of this process, you need to consider:
- Who should be responsible for the review
- How often the review should be completed
- How far in advance do you want to send reminders
Auto-fill responses
On the other side of the vendor questionnaire process, you may be required to complete the questionnaires yourself. As part of setting up your automation, you should incorporate a set of standard responses that can be used to respond to customer questions. Not only does this streamline processes, but it also ensures that the people responsible for responding to questionnaires all give the same answer. This eliminates confusion and possible compliance violations.
Considerations here should include:
- Reviewing questionnaires for similar questions
- Knowing the compliance mandates to which your organization needs to map responses
- What questions can’t be auto-filled
Collaboration processes
Even a well-oiled machine needs regular maintenance. Your security questionnaire automation is no different. In fact, it might be more important to do a regular “tune-up” to ensure that your responses are relevant and recent. This means that your teams will need to collaborate with one another and with vendors.
You should make sure that you have the appropriate lines of communication established before you put the automation into action. This relieves confusion and miscommunication. Some considerations should include:
- Assigning responsible parties
- Events triggering an update
- Chain of review for any changes
- Assigning appropriate read/write/comment permissions
Workflows
Even though you’ve already assigned responsibilities and permissions during the initial set-up phase, you still need to make sure that you have the appropriate workflows. In other words, you need to know how the review process works and review whether the automation follows the right chain of review.
As part of this process, you may want to review:
- Who receives the questionnaire
- Who completes the questionnaire
- Who reviews the questionnaire responses
- Who sends the responses
Reminders
Whether you’re sending questionnaires to a customer or reviewing them from a vendor, your team needs to complete the process as efficiently as possible. However, while getting the responses and reviews completed is important, other responsibilities often get in the way. If you want to get tasks completed in a timely fashion, you need to make sure that you set automatic reminders.
Considerations should include:
- The time it takes to answer or review a questionnaire
- Internal or external deadlines that need to be met
- Any regulatory or industry-standard timelines
Tracking
While your workflow drives how the automation forwards information, your tracking should give you insight into the questionnaire’s status. One of the most painful parts of the questionnaire process is trying to figure out who has the document, how much they have completed, and how to follow up with them. The purpose of the security questionnaire automation is to eliminate routine, mundane, manual tasks, like sending out multiple status update emails to various people.
Your tracking should provide visibility into who is working on the questionnaire and its current status.
Data verification
The biggest challenge organizations face is verifying the responses. Often, the people responsible for completing questionnaires are not security professionals. Additionally, on the recipient end, many companies find it time-consuming to compare questionnaire answers to associated documentation like SOC or audit reports.
Your automated solution should have a way to streamline this process by giving you insight into how provided answers compare with the official documents supporting them. From a security perspective, this means being able to validate controls and align them with responses, including things like:
- Patching cadence
- Network security
- Web application security
- Identity and access controls
SecurityScorecard’s Atlas: Faster, more accurate security questionnaire validation
SecurityScorecard’s Atlas makes it easier for organizations to get and stay compliant. Our questionnaire and evidence exchange platform comes with over 15 industry-standard questionnaires, including ISO, SIG, and NIST so that you can get started in seconds.
With Atlas, you can validate responses in real-time aligning the SecurityScorecard platform’s security ratings to individual questions. Atlas compares our ratings to the responses, giving you greater visibility into your vendors’ security posture. Instead of dreading the questionnaire and verification process, SecurityScorecard’s Atlas gives you the visibility and validation you need while eliminating the time-consuming manual processes that you don’t need.
