Rethinking vendor due diligence
Articles on TPRM strategy, vendor risk, and how modern teams are changing the way they approach third-party assessments.
OneTrust helped define the TPRM category. But complexity, pricing, and bolted-on AI are pushing teams to look elsewhere. Here are the best alternatives worth evaluating in 2026.
ProcessUnity has been a fixture in TPRM for over two decades. But its aging architecture, rigid questionnaires, and lack of AI have teams looking for something better.
A quantitative inherent risk score replaces gut feel with something defensible, repeatable, and auditable — making sure your review capacity goes to the vendors that actually need it.
Docubark recently wrapped our SOC 2 Type 2 audit. Since we usually sit on the other side of these reports evaluating vendors, going through one ourselves was clarifying. Some flattering, some less so.
Every subcontractor touching CUI has to meet the same CMMC flow-down requirements you do. Here's why manual vendor management collapses fast — and what a workable system needs to look like before Phase 2 hits.
In April 2026, Vercel disclosed a breach through a compromised third-party AI tool. Here's how to think about it — and why the vendor's logo is the start of a risk conversation, not the end.
For twenty years, vendor risk management has tried to gauge risk by interrogating vendor controls. But we can barely understand our own controls from the inside. A better approach focuses on objective, verifiable signals.
Every TPRM team knows the feeling. You send out a security questionnaire. Three weeks later, after follow-ups and a call you didn't want, you get back a document full of vague answers. Did you actually learn anything?
Workday processes payroll for thousands of enterprises. When you send them a security questionnaire, you already know what's going to happen. Here's a better approach.
If questionnaires add little value for large enterprise vendors, where does the real vendor risk in your program actually live? With small vendors. Specifically: small vendors with high inherent risk.
Plot your vendor portfolio on a simple Cartesian plane: vendor size on one axis, inherent risk on the other. This framework clarifies most of the hard decisions your program faces.
Vendor security questionnaires are failing. Instead, anchor everything in inherent risk. Let that drive the depth of review and the type of evidence you collect.