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Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire Templates

Tired of filling out vendor security assessment questionnaires or shared assessment SIG templates? A vCISO service could be just the right thing for you.

Is your sales team coming to you with deals that won’t close until you’ve filled out yet another Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire? Or maybe you have a stack of vendor security assessments on your desk that are taking all your time and impeding business. Security assurance due diligence, however frustrating, is a big part of today’s customer engagement process. You need to do it so your customers will trust your company and entrust you with their data. Hopefully, you are performing your own security due diligence on the vendors that you wish to onboard and do business with as well. All of this takes time away from you and your team. This is time which you don’t have or that is better spent on your core business operations.

The standard vendor security assurance assessments like SIG, SIG light, Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) and others can be quite daunting. To make things worse, many companies make up their own or use a hybrid format vendor security assessment, which means you cannot easily recycle your answers from one customer inquiry to the next. Additionally, the cybersecurity risk questions contained in these questionnaires are often sophisticated and hard. So you can’t just rely on a junior resource to fill them out and get them done. They require someone with highly technical experience and a deep knowledge of your information systems and processes to provide the detailed answers they require.

Perhaps outsourcing this work is the answer for you? A Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) service could solve this problem in the most cost-effective way. With an ongoing service to manage and operate some or all your security and privacy programs, a vCISO service can be a cost-effective way to offload work so that you can focus your resources on your core mission. For a fixed monthly fee, a vCISO service should operate as many modules as you select from a portfolio of cybersecurity, risk, compliance, and privacy services. For example:

  • Vulnerability Management
  • Patch Management
  • Security & Privacy Questionnaires
  • Security Awareness Training
  • Vendor Privacy Risk Management
  • Vendor Security Risk Management
  • SOC2 Compliance
  • PCI DSS Compliance
  • DSAR Management and Fulfillment
  • Risk Assessments
  • Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs)
  • vCISO Leadership Service
  • Executive GRC Reporting
  • Policy Development
  • SDLC Security
  • Product Security Assessment
  • System Hardening
  • Incident Response

As your needs scale up and down over time, the vCISO service can respond with the right level of service. Employing your own CISO or CPO may not be ideal, depending on where you are in your growth plan. In-house staff of that level of seniority are not only expensive, but they are hard to find. It can be frustrating to be experienced enough to command a position at that level only to be spending your days responding to customer questionnaires and editing data inventory spreadsheets.

A vCISO service will adapt security and privacy service methodology to your unique needs and demands. As your needs scale up and down over time, the provider can respond with the right level of service without a long-term commitment.

It is always better to bring in a team of specialists that can provide the services you need, when you need it, from a bench of staff that are highly qualified for each task. Then you can focus on what you do best - growing your organization. A virtual CISO service can even talk to your customers and prospects and provide security assurance on your behalf.

This should not feel like staff augmentation. The vCISO should take full responsibility for the oversight and leadership of activities assigned. A senior cybersecurity risk consultant will normally take the lead and the team assigned to your program will adapt to your evolving needs. When you have audits underway, the team of specialists for the vCISO service may be different from those that execute your business-as-usual security programs.

With vCISO you should be getting specialists for each project.
A good vCISO service will also not charge you extra each time you ask for additional responsibility. The service pricing should be based on an average service level agreement. If you have a sudden request, to meet the demands of a critical sales opportunity, the vCISO service should just scale up and respond aggressively without needing to talk about budget first. The team should just be monitoring the rolling monthly amount of effort provided and work with you to adjust the service level as required.
Truvantis, Inc. offers the highest quality of cybersecurity, risk, compliance, and privacy in a vCISO service package. Unlike other service providers at Truvantis we do not demand a long-term commitment locking you into something that later no longer meets your needs. We are confident that you will continue to work with us because of the quality of our service.

Contact Truvantis today to see if vCISO service is right for your organization. Get those vendor security assessment questionnaires and SIG templates filled out and returned right away, for a fraction of the time and cost!

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