Your Customers Already Know You’re Not Transparent

Why the security review ritual is broken, and what it actually looks like to earn vendor trust. Every vendor in security claims their customers trust them. The 891-question security questionnaire sitting in someone’s inbox says otherwise. The third-party risk review process was built on a reasonable premise: before you hand sensitive data or critical infrastructure over to a vendor, you should have some confidence they’re doing what they say they’re doing. What it became, in practice, is something closer to a paper trail — a ritual that transfers liability without producing confidence, and burns enormous amounts of time on both sides of the transaction while solving almost nothing. The vendors and practitioners who’ve been thinking hardest about this problem have arrived at a common conclusion: Trust between vendors and customers isn’t a questionnaire problem. It’s a visibility problem. You can’t trust what you can’t see. And for most of the industry, the security posture of your vendors is still something you have to ask about, periodically, reactively, with a spreadsheet. Three conversations from our past ‘ Security You Should Know’ episodes point toward what changes when that model breaks down — and what it looks like to build something better.
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