Security questionnaires aren’t just an inconvenience – they’re a constant challenge for security and sales departments.
They take time out of organizations by filling the schedules of professionals with monotonous, automated work. But what if there was a way to reduce or even eliminate security questionnaires altogether? The main problem is not the lack of great questionnaires, but the questionnaires themselves.
At SafeBase, we’re not just about transparency—it’s at the heart of everything we do, from how we build our products to how we communicate about them. In the spirit of transparency, in this part we will talk about ours Trust Center platform in length:
- Why we believe in the Trust Center > security questionnaires
- How the Trust Center shortens and excludes questionnaires
- How to demonstrate the ROI of your trust center investment
Let’s dive in.
Why the first trust center approach helps
Solving the questionnaire task means going beyond the questionnaire with a Trust Center.
Trust centers are created to replace questionnaires. While trust centers can operate and support polling features—as ours at SafeBase do—the goal of a trust center is to offer a long-term solution to security questionnaires.
The labor and budget spent on security questionnaires alone can cost as much as a full-time employee (and in many cases more). For any enterprise or scaling organization, security assessments are a huge cost center and add to the turnaround time for the business.
Most organizations believe that the solution to questionnaire redundancy and investment is to make questionnaires easier. What does that mean? Creating workarounds for less painful questionnaires that, even with AI, create many problems:
- The need for human intervention or supervision
- Difficult to scale and expensive to outsource
- Lack of trust in AI solutions with sensitive information
Trust centers offer an alternative to the security inquiry process, ie. solve the real problem. Yes, it is important to be able to handle security questionnaires as a last mile support option. However, long-term problem reduction starts with a comprehensive Trust Center platform.
How SafeBase reduces security questionnaire burden
Cut the friction. If there were two words to describe how Trust Centers (created by SafeBase) reduce the burden of security questionnaires, these would be them. Fortunately, we have more than two words.
SafeBase takes the traditionally repetitive steps in the security screening process — requesting documentation, accessing and approving shared communications, answering questionnaires — then either simplifies or automates them. No more unnecessary back and forth. No more excess. No more threats to security integrity under the guise of obscurity.
So how do we achieve this on our platform?
1. Go beyond questionnaires with Trust Centers
Security questionnaires get a band-aid. Organizations traditionally look for cures for the symptoms of: “How can we make questionnaires more user-friendly/less intrusive/less creepy?” This status quo approach can solve some short-term problems – time spent on the questionnaire, management and organization, etc. – but does not ask the question “Why do we have to do this in the first place?”
Instead of accepting security questionnaires as a necessary evil, SafeBase aims to make security questionnaires a pain of the past. Our trust-centered approach reduces inbound inquiries by 74% or more. Some customers like Transverse beamdiscount up to 98%.
Trust centers act as a source of truth for sales and security teams, as well as for external customers and partners. By moving the security review process from inquiries to self-service, Trust Centers help buyers understand an organization’s security posture and enable fast, yet secure information sharing.
The right trust center takes the guesswork out of security validation while providing the flexibility needed to properly manage access to security information/documentation. Look for features like:
- Automated NDA signing
- Magic links for access without credentials and without password
- Automated access workflows such as automatic and bulk invitations and expirations with automatic alerts
- Permission profiles for detailed management
- Automated document watermarks
- Changelogs for visibility (and audit season!)
- Support for SCIM and SAML protocols
Organizations that do not address the security questionnaire problem at their core will continue to play a short-term, highly reactive, time-consuming game. Trust Centers are a step towards transformation with a vision to streamline the security verification process.
2. Automate the questionnaires you receive with artificial intelligence
Again, transparency is at the core of our work. While we’re (obviously) strong advocates of trust centers as a bet for any security-conscious organization, we recognize that opting out of polling takes time. From a company that has already helped more than 700 customers do just that, we know that questionnaires are still going to be tough – organizations need solutions for both short-term and long-term challenges.
While our Trust Center dramatically reduces the need for inbound questionnaires, SafeBase offers AI Questionnaire Assistance to mitigate the impact on organizations that must manage residual questionnaires. AI eliminates time-consuming questionnaire forwarding by using security-trained LLMs and SLMs to provide high-confidence answers to security domain questions without requiring intensive human intervention.
AI Questionnaire Assistance is easy for all teams to use, taking the burden off solution engineers and security teams who are typically tasked with answering questionnaires. Whether it’s unified questionnaire tables, trust scoring, automatic approval or one-click knowledge base additions, SafeBase has organizations covered. The capability adjacent to the Trust Center may not eliminate questionnaires, but it certainly takes the stress out of them.
3. Answer questionnaires in TPRM using our Chrome extension
When an organization needs to meet buyers where they are, such as in the TPRM portal, SafeBase extends survey capabilities with our Chrome extension. Organizations can respond to security questionnaires directly in the portal, eliminating the additional back-and-forth when answering TPRM questionnaires.
SafeBase boasts a growing list of supported TPRM portals, including:
- A bunch
- Form stack
- Google Forms
- Microsoft Forms
- OneTrust
- Panoramas
- ProcessUnity
- ServiceNow
- Upgard
- Wistic
- ZenGRC
- ZipHQ
Maximize the ROI of Trust Centers
How can organizations be sure that the Trust Center is not an additional security cost? We’re hands-on — we (and our 700+ customers) can take advantage of our platform all day long. But if it is difficult to assess the impact on the ROI of the business, it is difficult to justify the investment.
This is where platform-centric analytics through SafeBase come into play.
SafeBase Analytics
SafeBase’s analytics capabilities look at the various ways a Trust Center impacts an organization’s security, trust and growth. Both Trust Center and AI Questionnaire Assistance provide a wealth of data to inform your security programs and buyer behavior.
Buyer information
Know where to focus your efforts by understanding where (and how) customers interact with the Trust Center. Organizations can view engagement metrics such as views, access requests, account activity, and document interactions, or view more detailed statistics such as approved/rejected/pending requests, access approval rate, and time to approval.
Security ROI
Communicate the impact of security and trust programs by linking Trust Center participation to security revenue. SafeBase dashboards demonstrate security ROI (via the Trust Center) so team efforts can be linked to ARR, pipelines and deal velocity cross-functionally with sales.
Prioritization
Our platform helps organizations calculate projected effort versus impact on the questionnaire side. Revenue and Deal Dashboards in Analytics highlight won and open deals, showing how security has impacted deals and where modern sales opportunities exist. It helps prioritize the direction of the best business results.
Trust Centers > Security Questionnaires
Security-conscious organizations face a growing challenge: What do we do with security questionnaires? Improving the security inquiry process (as it exists) is about addressing the immediate needs of your organization, while the results of investing in a Trust Center are clear:
- Fewer questionnaires with a broad platform
- Simpler questionnaires (for the ones you get)
- Faster and more reliable secure communication
While we are committed to a future without security questionnaires, we are sympathetic to the current needs of security organizations. Our Trust Center platform improves the security screening process, whether it’s addressing current needs (security questionnaires) or future needs (creating proactive security postures).
Organizations can finally move beyond the legacy patch to ensure security and trust by reducing the prevalence, latency and dependency on security questionnaires with SafeBase Trust Center Platform.
