Vendor Risk Management: Build Relationships, Guide Smart Choices, and Make Vendors Squirm
One of the most underrated tools in a security leader’s arsenal isn’t a piece of technology, a framework, or a control checklist. It’s vendor risk management used as a strategic relationship-building function.
Too often, third-party risk reviews get reduced to a compliance formality: fill out a questionnaire, attach a SOC 2, check a box. But when done well, vendor risk management becomes a way to:
- Influence vendor behaviors
- Protect the business from poor technical decisions
- Expose weak design choices early
- Strengthen cross-functional alignment
Vendor risk isn’t just a task for compliance and procurement teams — it must actively involve the technical teams who will own, operate, and support the solution long-term. These are the teams best positioned to identify operational risks, integration challenges, and architectural weaknesses that may not be visible on a vendor questionnaire.
Getting Vendors to Squirm (Productively)
One of the best ways to drive technical rigor is to make vendors uncomfortable — not by being hostile, but by asking the questions that expose design tradeoffs they hoped no one would notice.
- “Walk me through your data segregation model.”
- “How are cryptographic keys generated, rotated, and destroyed?”
- “What telemetry will we have access to in a breach scenario?”
- “What level of control do we have over user provisioning and deprovisioning?”
- “Where exactly does our data physically reside?”
When a vendor can’t answer confidently, or needs to ‘get back to you,’ that tells you more than any audit report.
You’re not trying to fail them. You’re giving them an opportunity to prove technical maturity — or reveal risk early enough that you can make informed choices.
The Sales Process Is Where Failure Begins
In many cases, third-party integration projects are doomed from the moment the sales cycle begins — because technical stakeholders weren’t involved.
If engineers aren’t talking to each other early, you’re flying blind:
- Are APIs compatible?
- Are dependencies well documented?
- Is data schema alignment feasible?
- Are integration assumptions realistic?
- Is vendor uptime actually sufficient?
By inserting vendor risk management into the sales due diligence phase, you force the right conversations to happen upfront. Security isn’t just protecting data; it’s helping the business avoid operational failure modes.
Relationship-Building, Not Just Gatekeeping
Vendor risk management is most effective when it acts as a partner to the business, not an obstacle:
- Provide vendor teams with your security requirements early.
- Offer technical workshops with your engineering team during vendor evaluation.
- Help business sponsors understand where certain vendors pose higher operational complexity.
- Document mitigation paths, exceptions, and compensating controls transparently.
The goal is not to prevent the business from moving forward — it’s to guide them toward vendors who can truly support your operational and security posture.
The Hidden ROI of Vendor Risk
When vendor risk management operates at this level, you get much more than a questionnaire:
- Fewer integration failures
- Shorter onboarding timelines
- Higher vendor accountability
- More leverage in contract negotiations
- Better preparation for audits and incidents
In short: better security, better business outcomes.
Final Thought
Vendor risk management isn’t about paperwork. It’s about forcing hard conversations early — when you still have leverage, when you can still walk away, and when the cost of failure is still theoretical.
Done well, it becomes a core part of pragmatic security leadership: making smart decisions, guiding your business partners, and ensuring your vendors work for you — not the other way around.
This reflects the kind of real-world security leadership I explore here — where security and business strategy align to drive better outcomes.