June 18, 2020

Vendor reviews

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Reviewed by

Accelerating security solutions for small businesses
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Tagore offers strategic services to small businesses.

A partnership that can scale
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Tagore prioritized finding a managed compliance partner with an established product, dedicated support team, and rapid release rate.

Standing out from competitors
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Tagore's partnership with Vanta enhances its strategic focus and deepens client value, creating differentiation in a competitive market.

When companies want to ensure that their vendors are handling data appropriately and that they aren’t susceptible to a data breach, they conduct vendor reviews. Let’s cover what vendor reviews are and how they work — and then learn how your company can seamlessly integrate vendor reviews into regular business operations to support your holistic security posture.

What is a vendor review?

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Vendor reviews allow companies to assess a vendor’s capacity to deliver and maintain effective security practices and other performance elements critical to their business. Vendor reviews are essential in evaluating the security practices of potential new vendors — and of periodically assessing existing vendors to ensure that they are maintaining established standards.

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Your company’s vendor review processes are a key part of your vendor management policy. Vendor reviews are particularly important when a vendor is performing work that impacts your business most directly: when a vendor is handling sensitive data, interacting with your customers, or handling a core function of your business. Vendor reviews should thus address a range of areas of risk that a vendor’s work could pose to an organization — from the security of a vendor’s physical environment to its data handling processes, and everything in between.

Access Review Stage	Content / Functionality
Across all stages	Easily create and save a new access review at a point in time View detailed audit evidence of historical access reviews
Setup access review procedures	Define a global access review procedure that stakeholders can follow, ensuring consistency and mitigation of human error in reviews Set your access review frequency (monthly, quarterly, etc.) and working period/deadlines
Consolidate account access data from systems	Integrate systems using dozens of pre-built integrations, or “connectors”. System account and HRIS data is pulled into Vanta. Upcoming integrations include Zoom and Intercom (account access), and Personio (HRIS) Upload access files from non-integrated systems View and select systems in-scope for the review
Review, approve, and deny user access	Select the appropriate systems reviewer and due date Get automatic notifications and reminders to systems reviewer of deadlines Automatic flagging of “risky” employee accounts that have been terminated or switched departments Intuitive interface to see all accounts with access, account accept/deny buttons, and notes section Track progress of individual systems access reviews and see accounts that need to be removed or have access modified Bulk sort, filter, and alter accounts based on account roles and employee title
Assign remediation tasks to system owners	Built-in remediation workflow for reviewers to request access changes and for admin to view and manage requests Optional task tracker integration to create tickets for any access changes and provide visibility to the status of tickets and remediation
Verify changes to access	Focused view of accounts flagged for access changes for easy tracking and management Automated evidence of remediation completion displayed for integrated systems Manual evidence of remediation can be uploaded for non-integrated systems
Report and re-evaluate results	Auditor can log into Vanta to see history of all completed access reviews Internals can see status of reviews in progress and also historical review detail