5 Reasons to Kickstart Your Vendor Risk Management Program with a Vendor Risk Assessment Template

With the average cost of a vendor data breach reaching $3.92 million, organizations are looking for stronger vendor risk management (VRM). If your organization is looking to address VRM but you’re new to the process, a vendor security questionnaire (also referred to as a vendor security risk assessment questionnaire) is a great starting point.
Where can you find a top-quality, easy-to-use excel based third-party vendor security questionnaire template? Some folks might look to the Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire tools, but this can be quite expensive ($7,000 at the time of writing this article). Or you can download our FREE template below.
Pivot Point Security’s FREE template includes a comprehensive questionnaire, with separate sections to help you track documentation requests and data types/elements handled by a vendor.
Just click here to download our free vendor risk assessment template.
How can something as simple as a vendor risk assessment template Excel file benefit your company? Here are 5 key reasons to use a template:

1. Using a high-quality, premade template provided by security experts who specialize in VRM can jump start your program development considerably. Why re-invent the wheel?
2. Using a proven template gives you confidence you’re asking the right questions, addressing key areas, and not “going overboard” with your vendor review.
3. A security questionnaire template that is an Excel file is an efficient and impartial mechanism to baseline a vendor’s security for both you and your vendors. Templates make it easy to compare “apples to apples” with minimal upfront investment and complexity, also ensuring all vendors are held to the same standard.
4. A vendor risk assessment template can help reduce procurement lead time and allow your business to quickly start working with your vendors.
5. A high-quality, ready-made template can also be a great baseline for customization. You may want to tailor your vendor assessments by service, criticality, regulatory expectations or risk level.