According to a recent Databox survey, B2B deals can take up to three months to close. The long duration can be partially attributed to lengthy third-party due diligence processes conducted by more than 85% of organizations these days.
Third-party due diligence typically involves extensive risk assessments and security reviews that your security team needs to address. For many vendor security teams, spending weeks performing internal security checks and completing extensive vendor questionnaires has become the new normal. For instance, completing a simple SIG questionnaire can require responses to 800+ questions, which can be quite demanding for your team.
While security reviews play an important role in demonstrating security to stakeholders, it doesn’t always have to be a time-consuming process.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to streamline security reviews to tighten your sales cycle and close deals much faster. You’ll learn:
- The definition and importance of a security review
- Common challenges organizations encounter when conducting security reviews
- The best way to overcome these challenges and expedite security reviews
What is a security review?
A security review is a systematic evaluation of your organization’s security measures, policies, and practices. It is a holistic approach aimed at identifying potential threats and ensuring that your organization adheres to industry best practices.
Security reviews can be both internal and external. External reviews are conducted by potential prospects who might consider your organization for business relationships. Internal reviews are proactive assessments aimed at identifying and mitigating potential security gaps—you must typically conduct them to be ready for external reviews.
For vendor security teams, security reviews can be a comprehensive and collaborative effort that involves various activities, such as:
- Policy reviews: Your security policies must be regularly updated to reflect the changing threat landscape, ensure industry-standard practices, and build a culture of security awareness that appeals to your prospects.
- Technical and administrative control reviews: You should review and monitor your security controls continuously so that you can verify their effectiveness and update them as needed.
- Third-party risk management: All third parties connected to your organization have a unique risk profile and threat landscape, and your prospects will want to know how you manage them. Conducting thorough reviews of your third-party security postures helps you assess how they may expand your attack surface and ensures they comply with your organization’s security standards.
- Access reviews: You must know who has access to your systems, applications, and sensitive data. Regular access reviews help prevent unauthorized access and ensure that access privileges are aligned with user roles and responsibilities.
- Penetration testing: Simulating cyberattacks is an excellent way to identify and patch vulnerabilities to minimize the risk of external threats.
{{cta_withimage10="/cta-modules"}} | How to Turn Security into Revenue ebook
Why should you conduct security reviews?
Internal security reviews help you understand and improve your organization's overall security posture and build trust with customers, investors, and other stakeholders more efficiently. They also help your organization complete external security reviews at a faster rate. If you already have demonstrable evidence from recently conducted internal security reviews, you’ll have adequate information to tackle external reviews.
External reviews are also important as they help you align with the security goals of your prospects and build credibility and trust early on in the relationship.
Not conducting security reviews frequently can leave threats and vulnerabilities unchecked and damage your security posture, which can lead to the following issues:
- Reputational damage: Without proof of a strong security posture, partners and prospects may lose trust in your organization.
- Missed business opportunities: Customers want peace of mind knowing their partners and vendors protect their data and focus on operational stability. Prospects will hesitate to do business with you if they can’t verify your security controls.
- Compliance issues: Comprehensive security is a fundamental component of many regulations and voluntary compliance standards. Security reviews help you conduct a gap analysis and address instances when you fall out of compliance.
How are security reviews conducted?
While the specifics of a security review process can vary depending on your industry or point of assessment, there are two general methods you can opt for:
- Questionnaires
- External audits
The following table compares these options:
Regardless of your chosen option, security reviews involve extensive evidence collection, which can be tedious if done manually. Even if you engage an external auditor, you’ll need to collect various documentation both before and after the audit to implement all the relevant suggestions.
Relying on a manual workflow can also cause other operational issues, most notably:
- Resource waste and inefficiency
- Extended sales cycles
- Delays on other security tasks
- Overworked security teams
These issues can be particularly visible if you try monitoring your security posture continuously or conduct frequent internal security reviews. However, even teams that spend a lot of resources on point-in-time assessments may not get the benefit out of them because evidence collection through spreadsheets and scattered documents is tedious and error-prone.
When you factor in all of these issues, it’s clear that manual work is among the main challenges organizations face when it comes to security reviews—but it’s far from the only one.
{{cta_webinar5="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation webinar
Challenges in a typical security review process
Many organizations wait until a prospect sends them a security questionnaire to have a granular security review.
At first glance, this may seem logical because it means you’re focusing your resources on other impactful activities until you’re asked to demonstrate your security posture. Still, these reactive reviews suffer from two major drawbacks:
- You might rush the review process to close the deal faster, which results in haphazard reviews with poorly answered questions.
- If you’re handling multiple questionnaires in a short window, it puts considerable pressure on your security team to conduct last-minute reviews—when important deals are on the line.
Other notable challenges you might encounter include the following:
- Unbalanced task-to-team ratios: Inefficient processes lead to extensive manual busywork, which can overwhelm smaller teams without yielding sufficient results.
- Compliance complexity: Compliance requirements change at all times, so you may fall behind without a well-optimized process that ensures timely and accurate reviews.
- Data availability: A comprehensive security review requires robust data, and you might struggle to obtain it if you rely on disparate systems and outdated tools.
The good news is that overcoming these hiccups is more than possible with tools that enable process automation.
A modern solution: Security review automation
Software-supported security reviews are better and more efficient than the manual approach, which creates inefficiencies and burdens teams. Your ideal solution is to opt for trust management platform that lets you automate and streamline questionnaires and other aspects of security reviews.
The right solution drives growth-boosting benefits such as:
- Increased efficiency: Trust management platforms can take numerous tasks off your plate, such as evidence collection and centralization. This lets your team focus on valuable tasks without getting bogged down in manual work.
- Resource savings: Conducting security reviews through comprehensive software helps you stay on top of potentially expensive security threats.
- More sales opportunities: Trust management platforms make it easy to showcase your controls and their efficiency to prospects, ensuring you don’t miss any opportunities due to delayed or poorly answered questionnaires.
- Increased ROI: When you have a bird’s-eye overview of your security initiatives, you can improve the return on your security investment with better sales outcomes.
{{cta_testimonial16="/cta-modules"}} | ComplyCube customer story
Automate security reviews and questionnaires with Vanta
Vanta is a comprehensive trust management platform that helps organizations of sizes automate compliance, manage risk, and prove trust. It offers security and risk management solutions, most notably a dedicated Trust Center that makes it easy to complete security reviews faster.
With Trust Center, you can demonstrate your security and compliance posture in real time. All your controls are displayed in one dashboard that you can share with your stakeholders during the review process.
Watch this webinar to see how the Trust Center can accelerate your deal cycles.
Another way Vanta streamlines security workflows is through its Questionnaire Automation solution. It can help you complete security reviews up to 5 times faster with features such as:
- AI-enabled responses that eliminate the need for manual entries
- Centralized security knowledge base to help you respond to questionnaires faster
- Multiple questionnaire completion formats to accommodate your prospects’ needs
- 73 percent coverage across security questions
- 95 percent acceptance rate of AI-generated answers
Visit our Questionnaire Automation page or request a demo today to learn more.
{{cta_simple13="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation product page
Understanding Security Posture
Security reviews: Definition, common methods, and challenges
Understanding Security Posture
According to a recent Databox survey, B2B deals can take up to three months to close. The long duration can be partially attributed to lengthy third-party due diligence processes conducted by more than 85% of organizations these days.
Third-party due diligence typically involves extensive risk assessments and security reviews that your security team needs to address. For many vendor security teams, spending weeks performing internal security checks and completing extensive vendor questionnaires has become the new normal. For instance, completing a simple SIG questionnaire can require responses to 800+ questions, which can be quite demanding for your team.
While security reviews play an important role in demonstrating security to stakeholders, it doesn’t always have to be a time-consuming process.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to streamline security reviews to tighten your sales cycle and close deals much faster. You’ll learn:
- The definition and importance of a security review
- Common challenges organizations encounter when conducting security reviews
- The best way to overcome these challenges and expedite security reviews
What is a security review?
A security review is a systematic evaluation of your organization’s security measures, policies, and practices. It is a holistic approach aimed at identifying potential threats and ensuring that your organization adheres to industry best practices.
Security reviews can be both internal and external. External reviews are conducted by potential prospects who might consider your organization for business relationships. Internal reviews are proactive assessments aimed at identifying and mitigating potential security gaps—you must typically conduct them to be ready for external reviews.
For vendor security teams, security reviews can be a comprehensive and collaborative effort that involves various activities, such as:
- Policy reviews: Your security policies must be regularly updated to reflect the changing threat landscape, ensure industry-standard practices, and build a culture of security awareness that appeals to your prospects.
- Technical and administrative control reviews: You should review and monitor your security controls continuously so that you can verify their effectiveness and update them as needed.
- Third-party risk management: All third parties connected to your organization have a unique risk profile and threat landscape, and your prospects will want to know how you manage them. Conducting thorough reviews of your third-party security postures helps you assess how they may expand your attack surface and ensures they comply with your organization’s security standards.
- Access reviews: You must know who has access to your systems, applications, and sensitive data. Regular access reviews help prevent unauthorized access and ensure that access privileges are aligned with user roles and responsibilities.
- Penetration testing: Simulating cyberattacks is an excellent way to identify and patch vulnerabilities to minimize the risk of external threats.
{{cta_withimage10="/cta-modules"}} | How to Turn Security into Revenue ebook
Why should you conduct security reviews?
Internal security reviews help you understand and improve your organization's overall security posture and build trust with customers, investors, and other stakeholders more efficiently. They also help your organization complete external security reviews at a faster rate. If you already have demonstrable evidence from recently conducted internal security reviews, you’ll have adequate information to tackle external reviews.
External reviews are also important as they help you align with the security goals of your prospects and build credibility and trust early on in the relationship.
Not conducting security reviews frequently can leave threats and vulnerabilities unchecked and damage your security posture, which can lead to the following issues:
- Reputational damage: Without proof of a strong security posture, partners and prospects may lose trust in your organization.
- Missed business opportunities: Customers want peace of mind knowing their partners and vendors protect their data and focus on operational stability. Prospects will hesitate to do business with you if they can’t verify your security controls.
- Compliance issues: Comprehensive security is a fundamental component of many regulations and voluntary compliance standards. Security reviews help you conduct a gap analysis and address instances when you fall out of compliance.
How are security reviews conducted?
While the specifics of a security review process can vary depending on your industry or point of assessment, there are two general methods you can opt for:
- Questionnaires
- External audits
The following table compares these options:
Regardless of your chosen option, security reviews involve extensive evidence collection, which can be tedious if done manually. Even if you engage an external auditor, you’ll need to collect various documentation both before and after the audit to implement all the relevant suggestions.
Relying on a manual workflow can also cause other operational issues, most notably:
- Resource waste and inefficiency
- Extended sales cycles
- Delays on other security tasks
- Overworked security teams
These issues can be particularly visible if you try monitoring your security posture continuously or conduct frequent internal security reviews. However, even teams that spend a lot of resources on point-in-time assessments may not get the benefit out of them because evidence collection through spreadsheets and scattered documents is tedious and error-prone.
When you factor in all of these issues, it’s clear that manual work is among the main challenges organizations face when it comes to security reviews—but it’s far from the only one.
{{cta_webinar5="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation webinar
Challenges in a typical security review process
Many organizations wait until a prospect sends them a security questionnaire to have a granular security review.
At first glance, this may seem logical because it means you’re focusing your resources on other impactful activities until you’re asked to demonstrate your security posture. Still, these reactive reviews suffer from two major drawbacks:
- You might rush the review process to close the deal faster, which results in haphazard reviews with poorly answered questions.
- If you’re handling multiple questionnaires in a short window, it puts considerable pressure on your security team to conduct last-minute reviews—when important deals are on the line.
Other notable challenges you might encounter include the following:
- Unbalanced task-to-team ratios: Inefficient processes lead to extensive manual busywork, which can overwhelm smaller teams without yielding sufficient results.
- Compliance complexity: Compliance requirements change at all times, so you may fall behind without a well-optimized process that ensures timely and accurate reviews.
- Data availability: A comprehensive security review requires robust data, and you might struggle to obtain it if you rely on disparate systems and outdated tools.
The good news is that overcoming these hiccups is more than possible with tools that enable process automation.
A modern solution: Security review automation
Software-supported security reviews are better and more efficient than the manual approach, which creates inefficiencies and burdens teams. Your ideal solution is to opt for trust management platform that lets you automate and streamline questionnaires and other aspects of security reviews.
The right solution drives growth-boosting benefits such as:
- Increased efficiency: Trust management platforms can take numerous tasks off your plate, such as evidence collection and centralization. This lets your team focus on valuable tasks without getting bogged down in manual work.
- Resource savings: Conducting security reviews through comprehensive software helps you stay on top of potentially expensive security threats.
- More sales opportunities: Trust management platforms make it easy to showcase your controls and their efficiency to prospects, ensuring you don’t miss any opportunities due to delayed or poorly answered questionnaires.
- Increased ROI: When you have a bird’s-eye overview of your security initiatives, you can improve the return on your security investment with better sales outcomes.
{{cta_testimonial16="/cta-modules"}} | ComplyCube customer story
Automate security reviews and questionnaires with Vanta
Vanta is a comprehensive trust management platform that helps organizations of sizes automate compliance, manage risk, and prove trust. It offers security and risk management solutions, most notably a dedicated Trust Center that makes it easy to complete security reviews faster.
With Trust Center, you can demonstrate your security and compliance posture in real time. All your controls are displayed in one dashboard that you can share with your stakeholders during the review process.
Watch this webinar to see how the Trust Center can accelerate your deal cycles.
Another way Vanta streamlines security workflows is through its Questionnaire Automation solution. It can help you complete security reviews up to 5 times faster with features such as:
- AI-enabled responses that eliminate the need for manual entries
- Centralized security knowledge base to help you respond to questionnaires faster
- Multiple questionnaire completion formats to accommodate your prospects’ needs
- 73 percent coverage across security questions
- 95 percent acceptance rate of AI-generated answers
Visit our Questionnaire Automation page or request a demo today to learn more.
{{cta_simple13="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation product page
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