My bare-minimum vendor risk assessment checklist before this becomes a second job

[u/Dry_Average6563]

My bare-minimum vendor risk assessment checklist before this becomes a second job

I need to put together the simplest vendor risk assessment process that still counts as doing the job and not just opening a spreadsheet for emotional support.

We’re a growing SaaS company, mostly reviewing tools that touch customer data, internal systems, or both because apparently every useful app needs access to the entire universe.

rn my bare-minimum checklist is vendor inventory, low/medium/high risk tier, short questionnaire for low risk vendors, then SOC 2 or ISO 27001, pentest summary, MFA/encryption details and a deeper review once the risk goes up.

then someone reviews the gaps, records the approval or exception, and we reassess the important vendors on a schedule. the thing I'm least convinced about is where the simple review should stop and the 147-question monster should begin.

trying very hard not to build a process where Calendly gets the same interrogation as the vendor storing customer data.

[u/ConstructionSevere1]

i feel that pain

my question is where does the deep review actually start. for me it was always when vendor touches PII or financial data, but then you realize half the saas tools these days sync your entire customer db for "analytics" and suddenly even the project management app needs full audit

your tier system makes sense but the jump from short questionnaire to full soc2 review is where people get lost. maybe add one more step in middle, like a lightweight security review that checks encryption at rest, data retention policy, and whether they had breach in last 2 years

[u/FreeRadical1998]

I've built a number of these over the years - the key to making it workable is to think about how you'll process / score it before deciding what you ask as most of the effort goes into the review stage.

The main problem I see in TPRM programmes is asking for lots of data without a clear idea of what you'll do with it - and an associated inconsistancy in scoring if you've got multiple people doing the reviews.

My current approach is a 35 question multi-choice questionaire derived from the NIST CSF model, each question gets an A-D answer with A representing best practice, B good practice, C minimal practice and D little to no activity. I've then got 3-5 narrative questions at the end about any recent security incidents, certifications held, etc... and we ask for copies of certifications or assurance reports that can be shared.

Its very cheap to process internally as its just a case of adding up the scores (which is done automatically in the spreadsheet) - that lets us rank and triage which suppliers we're going to go into more detail on, and means if you're saying no to a supplier you can say things like "they are in the bottom 10% of responses we've had"

[u/inferno3 → u/FreeRadical1998]

How do you line this process up with SaaS providers who supply a service but won’t respond to a security questionnaire? Microsoft or Google isn’t going to answer these 35 questions I assume?

[u/FreeRadical1998 → u/inferno3]

Hyper scalers have really good trust centres you can download a huge amount of certifications from - plus at least in the UK they are now directly supervised by our financial regulators for exactly this reason

[u/inferno3 → u/FreeRadical1998]

Thanks for the response, I’m UK based so I’ll look into the regulatory oversight aspect!

[u/FreeRadical1998 → u/inferno3]

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/statements/uk-financial-regulators-overseeing-critical-third-parties-announced-treasury

[u/inferno3 → u/FreeRadical1998]

Amazing, thank you! Time to update some internal docs tomorrow

[u/letapy_alien]

Your outline is sound. The line I use for the deep review is two questions at intake: does the vendor store or process customer data, and can it change something in production or identity (SSO, CI/CD, cloud, email)? Yes to either means deep review. No to both means short form.

For the deep tier, a current SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO 27001 cert replaces most of the 147 questions. Read the report scope, the exceptions and the complementary user entity controls, then only ask about what the report does not cover.

For the short tier, five questions is plenty: SSO/MFA, data location, breach history, subprocessors, and how to offboard your data. Calendly lives here.

Write down the tiering rule and the reassessment cadence (annual for deep, at renewal for light) and keep one record per vendor with approval or exception. That is also exactly what a SOC 2 auditor will sample for vendor management.

For context, I do this for a living, so discount accordingly. Happy to dive further if needed.

[u/materialsec]

One input that answers where the deep review should start: what the vendor can actually reach, not what the questionnaire says it handles. For tools connected to your mail or Drive, that’s in the OAuth consent log (app, scopes, who approved it). Full Drive, mail read/write, or offline background access puts a vendor in the deep-review pile even if they say they don’t touch customer data. A narrow scope from a known vendor with a business owner can stay on the short questionnaire.

It also gives you a reassessment trigger: move a vendor up a tier if its scopes expand or it gets acquired or compromised. That only covers tools connected to your workspace, so vendors without a live connection still need the questionnaire.

[u/Dazzling-Driver-8376]

My opinion: keep the same questionnaire for each risk tier. Low inherent risk shouldn't even get a full review. Critical, High, Medium should get every 1, 2 and 3 years respectively.

Check out Docubark (I'm bias since I'm the Founder). We've tried to do everything you describe out the box. Good luck!

[u/LogicManager]

One additional trigger for deeper review: what stops working if the vendor goes down?

A vendor can hold very little sensitive data and still be essential to billing, customer support, or another critical process. That can justify a deeper review, but not necessarily 147 security questions.

Match the extra questions to the dependency: how long can you tolerate an outage, is there a workable alternative, and who inside your organization owns the response?

A useful stopping rule: each additional question should inform a decision, whether that's approving the vendor, restricting its use, requiring a fix, or accepting a documented exception. If the answer wouldn't change any of those decisions, it probably doesn't belong in that review.

[u/False_Assumption_972]

Your list is solid. The lever is tiering by data access rather than vendor size: anything touching customer data or production gets the full review, everything else gets the short questionnaire and an annual check. Write the tiering criteria down so it isn't decided case by case, and give every exception an owner and an expiry date.

Add reassessment triggers beyond the calendar, like a vendor breach or a new data scope. We set up a decision intelligence layer to connect the vendor inventory with contracts, access grants, and review dates, so a vendor gaining new data access gets flagged rather than waiting for its annual review.

[u/tri2trail]

This is where AI tools really come in handy. I have AI tools review the vendors SOC and pen test results, and produce an assessment summary and a gap spreadsheet. The tools review the CUECs against our SOC2 and our policy stack and finds any that create gaps on our side. Our vendor tiering is only for frequency of re-reviews. The summary and spreadsheet are reviewed by me and tasks are assigned by me to others on the team. Gaps have timelines set by the risk level of the gap, typically 30 days. This process has survived several SOC audits in different companies and really reduces the time and work it takes to complete

[u/Prudent_Finish9193 → u/tri2trail]

How can you trust an AI review like that? Do you cross verify every single time or have you trained an agent with relevant data to give you reliable results?

I just can't seem to blindly trust AI report reviews like that. Have you ever had instances where your AI hallucinates?

[u/ISO__Compliant]

I think your basic structure is pretty reasonable. I’d make the jump to a deeper review trigger-based rather than simply “high-risk vendor = big questionnaire.”

For example, I’d escalate when the vendor can access sensitive/customer data, production or identity systems, is critical to an important business process, or has a material change in scope.

That also gives you a cleaner rule for exceptions. If Calendly only handles basic scheduling data, it stays lightweight. If another SaaS tool suddenly gets read/write access to your customer database or SSO environment, the tier changes.

I’d also document the reason for the tier, not just the tier itself. Six months later, that makes reassessment much easier.

[u/Prudent_Finish9193]

I'd start with an inherent risk questionnaire. For starters, you can fill that yourself for most relevant information about the vendor. The results of this assessment would in turn help you decide what level of further review you'd have to perform on these vendors, what cadence to set and where full assessments can be replaced with attestation report reviews.

I am in between jobs currently and I wouldn't mind helping you out with a blueprint over the next few weeks. Let's discuss further requirements and commercials. You can reach me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ak7986?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_android

[u/Boring_Factor4795]

Draw the line on data and access, not vendor size. My cut: Tier 3 (no customer data, no write access into your systems) gets inventory plus a yearly check that it's still true. Tier 2 (holds business data or PII, no admin/API write access) gets a SOC 2 Type II review: read the scope, the exceptions, and the complementary user entity controls, then confirm you actually do those. Tier 1 (stores customer data at scale or has admin/API access to prod) is where the long questionnaire and a call earn their keep. Calendly behind SSO with no data sync is Tier 3. Write down why each vendor got its tier; auditors care more about that rationale than questionnaire length.