Cyber Defense eMagazine May Edition for 2022

In fact, according to the State of Vendor Security report, 90% of sales reps said they have at least one
deal push per quarter because they can’t respond to security reviews in time.
In the past, this was because of how difficult the vendor assessment process was for both vendors and
customers. Up until recently, the primary tools for managing vendor assessments were spreadsheets
and emails, which made it difficult to keep track of where vendors were in the process and ensuring each
assessment got completed, especially considering the volume of vendors assessed each month.
As a result, customer/vendor relationships were often adversarial instead of collaborative. It was almost
like pulling teeth for customers to track down all of the information needed to initiate the assessment and
it would only get worse once they started engaging directly with the vendor.
However, as technology has advanced in recent years those relationships are starting to improve and
clients are beginning to look at their vendors as partners when it comes to security, which is the way it
should have always been.
It is in this environment that Whistic joined together with other top technology vendors, including Okta,
Airbnb, Zendesk, Asana, Atlassian, Snap, Notion, TripActions, and G2, to form the Security First Initiative
with the goal of making transparency between vendors and customers the expectation instead of the
exception. The reason being that transparency leads to trust, which ultimately leads to better protection
against third-party incidents for everyone involved.
In a nutshell, the vision of the initiative is this: The future of vendor security must be built on a foundation
of collaboration…[It’s] the only way to meet the needs of both buyers and sellers in the ecosystem. It’s
also the most efficient way to make transparency the expectation in vendor security, and when that
happens, everybody wins.
Making it easy for vendors to consolidate all of their security documentation, standard questionnaire
responses, certifications, and audits into an easy to share security profile, ensures that companies have
no excuse not to share their security information as early as possible in the sales cycle. Taking the extra
time to build out a profile before your customers ask can save countless hours that infosec and
cybersecurity teams once spent reacting and responding to one off requests.
An added benefit for vendors is that a transparent security posture can also be a differentiating factor
between you and your competition that ultimately leads you to close more business. According to the
2021 State of Trust and Transparency, 90% of respondents indicated that when a company publishes
their security and compliance information publicly it increases their trust in that business. Additionally,
96% of respondents said they would be more likely to purchase from a vendor that is transparent about
security posture.
If you would like to join the Security First Initiative or would like more information, you can read more
about the initiative here.
Cyber Defense eMagazine – May 2022 Edition 148
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