How a Trust Center Resolves Your Security Inquiry Issue

How a Trust Center Solves Your Security Questionnaire Problem

Addressing security inquiries is not merely an annoyance — it’s a repetitive issue for security and sales teams.

They consume time within companies, occupying professionals with tedious, automatable tasks. But what if there existed a solution to reduce or completely eliminate security inquiries? The primary issue does not lie in the absence of excellent inquiry tools — it lies within the inquiries themselves.

Here at SafeBase, rather than just discussing transparency, it forms the foundation of all our practices, from the construction of our products to how we present them. To uphold transparency, in this piece, we will delve extensively into our Trust Center solution:

Reasons why Trust Centers surpass security questionnaires
Ways in which a Trust Center decreases and eradicates questionnaires
Approaches to demonstrating the return on investment in a Trust Center

Lets explore further.

Advantages of a trust center focused strategy

Resolving the inquiry dilemma involves surpassing the questionnaire using a Trust Center.

Trust Centers are designed to supplant questionnaires. While Trust Centers may collaborate with and bolster questionnaire functionalities — similar to what we offer at SafeBase — the primary aim of a Trust Center is to provide a lasting remedy for security inquiries.

The costs in terms of labor and budget spent solely on security questionnaires can equate to the expenses of a full-time employee (and sometimes even more). For any large enterprise or expanding organization, security evaluations represent a substantial cost entity that elongates deal closure times for businesses.

Many organizations believe that the solution to redundancy and investment in inquiries is to streamline the questionnaire process. But what exactly does this imply? It refers to developing workaround solutions for less burdensome questionnaires which, despite the use of AI, introduce a plethora of issues:

Prerequisite for human supervision
Complicated scaling and costly outsourcing
An absence of reliance in AI solutions handling sensitive data

Trust Centers offer an alternative to the security questionnaire process by tackling the root cause of the problem. While it is essential to have the capacity to handle security questionnaires as a “last resort” support mechanism, the enduring problem resolution starts with a comprehensive Trust Center platform.

How SafeBase Alleviates the Security Inquiry Load

Minimize obstacles. If we had to summarize how Trust Centers (created by SafeBase) alleviate the burden of security inquiries in two words, these would be the ones. Fortunately, we have more than just two words.

SafeBase simplifies or automates traditionally repetitive measures in the security assessment process — such as document requests, access and authorization for sharing this communication, and responses to inquiries. No more unnecessary back-and-forth communication. No more redundancy. No more compromising security veracity under the veils of ambiguity.

So how do we implement this in our platform?

1. Progress from inquiries with Trust Centers

Inquiries receive temporary fixes. Historically, organizations have been seeking remedies for the symptoms: “How can we make inquiries more manageable/less invasive/less burdensome?” This standard approach might address some short-term challenges — time expended per inquiry, coordination and management, etc. — but it fails to address the fundamental query, “Why do we have to engage in this in the first place?”

Instead of accepting security inquiries as an inevitable inconvenience, SafeBase strives to relegate them to history. Our Trust Center-centric approach reduces incoming inquiries by 74% or more. Certain clients, like Crossbeam, observe up to a 98% decrease.

Trust centers serve as a reference point for sales and security teams, as well as external clients and partners. By transitioning the security evaluation process from request-oriented to self-service-driven, Trust Centers assist buyers in comprehending an organization’s security position and facilitating prompt, yet secure information sharing.

The appropriate trust center dispels uncertainties from security evaluations while providing you with the flexibility to effectively regulate access to security information/documentation. Seek out functionalities like:

Automated NDA endorsement
Convenience links for access without credentials/passwordless entry
Automatic access processes such as automated and bulk invitations, and time-limited access with automatic alerts
Authorization profiles for precise governance
Autonomous document branding
Revision history for transparency (and audit season!)
Support for SCIM and SAML agreements

Organizations that overlook the foundation of the security inquiry issue will continue playing a short-term, extremely reactive, labor-heavy game. Trust Centers mark the initial stride towards transformation, envisioning a streamlined security evaluation process.

2. Harness AI for automating inquiries

Once more, transparency constitutes the core of our operations. While we adamantly endorse trust centers as obligatory for any security-conscious organization, we acknowledge that transitioning away from inquiries requires time. Having assisted over 700 customers in this transition, we understand that inquiries will persist as an issue a little longer — organizations require solutions for both their immediate and prolonged issues.

Despite the substantial reduction in inbound questionnaires provided by our Trust Center, SafeBase introduces AI Questionnaire Support to alleviate the burden for organizations managing remaining questionnaires. Through the use of AI, the cumbersome process of exchanging questionnaires is eliminated, with security-trained LLMs and SLMs delivering reliable responses to security-related queries without extensive human involvement. For all teams, AI Questionnaire Support is user-friendly, relieving solutions engineers and security teams of the typical responsibility of responding to questionnaires. SafeBase offers solutions such as unified questionnaire tables, confidence scoring, automatic approvals, and easy additions to the Knowledge Base. This additional capability near the Trust Center may not eliminate questionnaires entirely, but it certainly reduces the associated stress.

3. Respond to TPRM questionnaires using our Chrome extension

If an organization needs to engage with buyers within their Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) portal, SafeBase enhances questionnaire functionalities with our Chrome extension. This allows organizations to address security questionnaire responses directly within the portal, streamlining the back-and-forth exchanges in addressing TPRM questionnaires.

SafeBase offers a broad range of supported TPRM portals, including:

Coupa
Formstack
Google Forms
Microsoft Forms
OneTrust
Panorays
ProcessUnity
ServiceNow
Upguard
Whistic
ZenGRC
ZipHQ

Optimize Trust Center Returns on Investment

How can organizations ensure that a Trust Center is not just another added cost in terms of security? We take a pragmatic approach— while we (along with our 700+ clients) can advocate for the advantages of our platform endlessly, it’s crucial to quantify the impact on business ROI for justifying the investment. Platform-driven analytics offered by SafeBase play a vital role here.

Analytics provided by SafeBase

SafeBase’s analytics feature evaluates the various ways in which a Trust Center can influence an organization’s security, trust, and expansion. Both the Trust Center and AI Questionnaire Support generate a wealth of data that provides insights into security programs and buyer behavior.

Buyer perspectives

Identifying the focus areas by recognizing how buyers interact with the Trust Center is crucial. Organizations can assess engagement metrics like views, access requests, account activity, and document interactions, or delve into detailed statistics such as approved/denied/pending requests, access approval rates, and approval time.

Security Returns on Investment

Demonstrating the impact of security and trust initiatives through the correlation of Trust Center engagement with security-driven revenue is vital. SafeBase’s dashboards showcase the return on security investments (via the Trust Center), allowing teams to link efforts to Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), pipeline, and deal velocity across functions, including sales.

Prioritization strategies

Our platform assists organizations in calculating the expected effort versus impact regarding questionnaires. The Revenue and Deals dashboards within Analytics highlight both won and ongoing deals, providing visibility into how security has influenced deals and where opportunities exist for collaboration with the sales team. This aids in prioritizing activities toward achieving the most robust business outcomes initially.

Trust Centers > Security Inquiry Forms

Security-focused organizations are confronted with a growing dilemma: how to handle security questionnaires effectively? Enhancing the security questionnaire process, while addressing the immediate needs of an organization, contrasts with the clear outcomes of investing in a Trust Center:

Fewer questionnaires through a comprehensive platform
Simplified questionnaires (for those that remain)
Swift and dependable security communication

While we look forward to a future without security questionnaires, we understand the current requirements of security-conscious organizations. Our Trust Center platform streamlines the security evaluation process, whether addressing current requirements (security questionnaires) or future objectives (developing proactive security measures). Organizations can transition away from antiquated, temporary solutions for security and trust communication by reducing the prevalence, latency, and reliance on security questionnaires with SafeBase’s Trust Center platform.

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About Author

AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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