Vendor Risk Assessment Questionnaires Explained

Choosing a Vendor Risk Assessment Questionnaire

Creating a risk assessment questionnaire from scratch can be challenging. Many organizations opt for an industry-standard third-party risk assessment template, such as the Standard Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire or the H-ISAC questionnaire for healthcare organizations, which is a good starting point. Templates based on established frameworks ensure that your questionnaire addresses critical areas like data security, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience.

A third-party risk questionnaire typically includes questions about:

• Vendor policies on data protection and cybersecurity.
• Compliance with industry standards and regulations.
• Security controls related to access management, information privacy, and incident response.
• Physical and digital infrastructure security measures.

Utilizing industry-standard questionnaires can get you started faster by providing an accepted pool of content your vendors are likely already familiar with. These templates offer a foundation, but organizations should adapt them to their specific needs, depending on their risk tolerance, industry, and regulatory requirements. A balanced approach ensures the questionnaire gathers relevant, accurate, and effective information tailored to each vendor's role.

Key Third-Party Risk Questions to Jumpstart Vendor Risk Assessment

For those just getting started, we’ve compiled the top 20 control questions to ask vendors. These questions serve as a starting point for evaluating vendors’ risk posture. They cover control areas from governance to information security to incident response management. Download our customizable Excel template for framework mapping, response options, and risk-scoring capabilities.

Sample Third-Party Risk Assessment Questions

1. Governance: Have an information security policy and topic-specific policies been defined, published, and communicated to staff and interested parties?
2. Governance: Are the information security policy and any topic-specific policies reviewed and signed off by management?
3. Asset Management: Does the organization have an asset management program that sets out how assets are inventoried, classified, handled, and disposed?
4. Risk Assessment: Has the organization developed a formal risk management program or process to identify, manage, review, and respond to information security risks?
5. Supply Chain: Does your organization identify and review suppliers who provide information systems, components, and services? Are they assessed using a third-party risk management process or program?
6. Identity Management: How does the organization manage access to its information systems, or systems holding sensitive or critical data?
7. Information Privacy: Is a data protection program in place for identifying, managing and communicating on how sensitive or personal data is used within the organization?
8. Data Security: Where sensitive or critical data is used, what data security controls have been applied to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of that data?
9. Operations Security: Does the organization have robust, documented operations procedures, including baseline configurations for information systems, change management, patching, and data backup?
10. Event Management: Describe how the organization conducts event management activities.
11. Event Management: Are processes in place to manage and analyze logs?
12. Continual Monitoring: Describe the processes in place, if any, for continual monitoring across the organization's network, systems, and physical access to premises.
13. Continual Monitoring Threat Detection: How does the organization plan for, monitor, detect, and respond to threats?
14. Incident Response Management: Describe the organization's incident management process.
15. Physical Security: Describe the approach taken to secure the physical premises and any secure areas from unauthorized personnel and environmental hazards.
16. People Management: Does the organization have defined processes for joiners, movers, and leavers, including screening, security training, and disciplinary actions?
17. Threat Detection: Does your company perform awareness and training campaigns related to phishing threats and best practices for identifying and reporting suspected phishing attempts, including periodic testing for effectiveness?
18. Business Continuity: Describe the organization's approach to business continuity and disaster recovery planning and testing.
19. System Development: How does the organization approach secure systems development?
20. Cloud Security: Where cloud service providers (PaaS, SaaS, or IaaS) are used to support or provide delivery of services, how does the organization secure its data or applications within the cloud environment?

Customize these questions to your organization's needs, regulatory requirements, and risk tolerance. Download our third-party risk questionnaire Excel template for complete response options and scoring.

Challenges of Vendor Risk Assessment Questionnaires

While vendor risk assessment questionnaires are essential, they are not without challenges:

Labor-Intensive: Completing a vendor risk assessment questionnaire can be time-consuming, especially for organizations that rely on numerous vendors. The questionnaires' development, distribution, and analysis require dedicated resources and expertise.

Snapshot in Time: Security questionnaires offer only a snapshot of a vendor’s security posture at a given moment. Cybersecurity is a rapidly evolving field, and new vulnerabilities can arise after completing the questionnaire.

Vendor Fatigue: Many vendors are overwhelmed by the repetitive nature of risk assessment questionnaires from different clients. As a result, vendors may delay or deprioritize completing these forms, hindering the overall assessment process.

Complex Supply Chains: With today’s interconnected supply chains, organizations need to assess the risks associated with third-party and fourth-party vendors—those that your vendors work with. This adds another layer of complexity to the risk management process.

Tips for Using Vendor Risk Questionnaires

Don't get locked into a single, rigid questionnaire.

It's easy to fall into analysis paralysis when selecting a single, "perfect" questionnaire. However, proper due diligence isn't feasible with a one-and-done approach. As soon as you receive questionnaire responses, the information gets stale. Maintaining real-time risk knowledge and awareness requires continuous evaluation. Whether using a standardized or proprietary approach, ensure that potential TPRM solution providers offer the flexibility to deliver industry-standard and custom questionnaires.

Leverage a repository of pre-defined assessments.

These include industry-standard questionnaires like the Standard Information Gathering (SIG) Lite or the Healthcare Information Sharing and Analysis Center (H-ISAC) Lite, as well as questionnaires specific to compliance and security frameworks (e.g., CMMC, GDPR, FCA, PCI, ISO 27001, NIST, etc.). Look for solutions that automatically map questionnaires to relevant frameworks, helping streamline your survey collection and management process.

Keep your customization options open.

Seek the capability to import or create items for review during the assessment process, along with customization options for combining questions to meet unique needs.

Regularly reassess your vendors and suppliers.

Vendor risk assessment is not a one-time process. It should be repeated regularly, especially for high-risk vendors. The frequency of reassessments depends on the vendor's criticality to your operations and the sensitivity of the data they handle. Companies operating in highly regulated industries may need to reassess their vendors annually or more frequently, depending on the applicable compliance requirements.

Complement questionnaires with continuous risk monitoring.

Complement periodic internal assessments with continuous external vendor threat monitoring. Cybersecurity risks evolve rapidly, and a vendor’s security posture can change quickly due to new vulnerabilities, incidents, or changes in their business processes. Continuous monitoring is essential to keeping up with these changes. Monitoring provides additional intelligence that can both reveal potential risks as they arise and be used to validate assessment responses regarding specific controls.

Next Steps

Vendor risk assessment questionnaires are essential to a robust third-party risk management program. Organizations should combine these questionnaires with real-time security monitoring, automated risk management tools, and ongoing vendor assessments to manage third-party risk effectively.

The right combination of tools and strategies will help you mitigate the risks associated with your vendor network, ensuring your business remains secure in an increasingly interconnected world. Our comprehensive guide provides more insight into the vendor risk assessment process. To learn how Prevalent can help you streamline it, schedule a strategy call or demo today.