Security questionnaires aren't just an inconvenience — they're a recurring problem for security and sales teams.
They bleed time from organizations, filling the schedules of professionals with monotonous, automatable work. But what if there were a way to reduce or even altogether eliminate security questionnaires? The root problem isn't a lack of great questionnaire products — it's the questionnaires themselves.
At SafeBase, we don't just talk about transparency — it's core to everything we do, from how we build our products to how we communicate about them. In the spirit of transparency, in this piece we're going to talk about our Trust Center platform at length:
- Why we're believers in Trust Centers > security questionnaires
- How a Trust Center reduces and eliminates questionnaires
- How to demonstrate the ROI of investing in a Trust Center
Let's dive in.
Why a trust center first approach helps
Solving the questionnaire problem means going beyond the questionnaire with a Trust Center.
Trust Centers are built to replace questionnaires. While Trust Centers may work with and support questionnaire functions — like ours do at SafeBase — the purpose of a Trust Center is to offer a long-term solution for security questionnaires.
The labor and budget costs 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 tremendous cost center and increase deal lead times for business.
Most organizations believe the solution for all of the redundancy and investment in questionnaires is making questionnaires easier. What does this mean? Creating workaround fixes for less painful questionnaires which, even with AI, present a bounty of problems:
- Need for human intervention or oversight
- Difficult to scale and expensive to outsource
- Lack of trust in AI solutions with sensitive information
Trust Centers suggest an alternative to the security questionnaire process i.e. solve the real problem. Yes, it's important to have capabilities to handle security questionnaires as a "last mile" support option. However, the long-term problem reduction begins with a comprehensive Trust Center platform.
How SafeBase reduces the security questionnaire burden
Cut friction. If there were two words to describe how trust centers (built by SafeBase) reduce the burden of security questionnaires, these would be them. Thankfully, we have more than two words.
SafeBase takes traditionally repetitive steps in the security review process — documentation requests, access and approval of sharing said communication, responses to questionnaires — then either simplifies or automates them. No more unnecessary back and forth. No more redundancy. No more compromising security integrity under the guise of obscurity.
So how do we achieve this in our platform?
1. Move beyond questionnaires with Trust Centers
Security questionnaires get the Band-Aid treatment. Organizations have traditionally pursued cures for the symptoms: "How can we make questionnaires more manageable/less intrusive/less dreadful?" This status quo approach can remedy some of the short-term issues — time spent per questionnaire, management and organization, etc. — but fails to ask the question, "Why are we having to do this in the first place?"
Rather than accept security questionnaires as a necessary evil, SafeBase aims to make security questionnaires a pain of the past. Our Trust Center-first approach reduces inbound questionnaires by 74% or more. Some customers, like Crossbeam, experience up to a 98% reduction.
Trust centers operate as a source of truth for both sales and security teams, plus external customers and partners. Shifting the security review process from request-driven to self-serve-driven, Trust Centers help buyers understand an organization's security posture and enable quick, yet secure information sharing.
The right trust center takes the guesswork out of security reviews while providing the flexibility you need to appropriately manage access to security information/documentation. Look for functionality like:
- Automated NDA signing
- Magic links for credential-free/passwordless access
- Automated access workflows like auto and bulk invites, and expiration dates with auto-alerts
- Permission profiles for granular governance
- Automated document watermarking
- Change logs for visibility (and audit season!)
- Support for SCIM and SAML protocols
Organizations that don't address the security questionnaire problem at its foundation will continue to play a short-term, highly reactive, labor-intensive game. Trust Centers are the step toward transformation, with the vision of streamlining the security review process.
2. Automate the questionnaires you get with AI
Again, transparency is at the heart of how we operate. While we're (clearly) strong advocates for trust centers as table stakes for any security-minded organization, we recognize the move away from questionnaires takes time. From a company that's helped over 700 customers do so already, we know questionnaires will continue to be a pain a bit longer — organizations need solutions for both their short-term and long-term problems.
Though our Trust Center drastically reduces the need for inbound questionnaires, SafeBase offers AI Questionnaire Assistance to mitigate the impact for organizations that have to manage residual questionnaires. AI eliminates the laborious back-and-forth of questionnaires, using security-trained LLMs and SLMs to provide high-confidence responses to security domain questions, without needing heavy human intervention.
AI Questionnaire Assistance is easy for all teams to use, taking the burden off solutions engineers and security teams normally tasked with answering questionnaires. Whether it's unified questionnaire tables, confidence scoring, auto-approvals, or one-click Knowledge Base additions — SafeBase has organizations covered. This Trust Center-adjacent capability may not eliminate questionnaires, but it certainly offloads the stress of them.
3. Answer questionnaires in TPRMs with our Chrome extension
If an organization needs to meet buyers where they are, i.e. in their TPRM portal, SafeBase expands questionnaire capabilities with our Chrome extension. Organizations can respond to security questionnaire answers right in the portal, eliminating the added back-and-forth in responding to TPRM questionnaires.
SafeBase boasts a growing list of supported TPRM portals, including:
- Coupa
- Formstack
- Google Forms
- Microsoft Forms
- OneTrust
- Panorays
- ProcessUnity
- ServiceNow
- Upguard
- Whistic
- ZenGRC
- ZipHQ
Maximize the ROI of Trust Centers
How can organizations be sure a Trust Center isn't another added security expense? We're practical — we (and our 700+ customers) can espouse the benefits of our platform all day. But if it's challenging to quantify the impact on business ROI, it's hard to justify the investment.
This is where platform-driven analytics through SafeBase come into play.
SafeBase analytics
SafeBase's analytics capability considers the different ways a Trust Center can impact an organization's security, trust, and growth. Both the Trust Center and AI Questionnaire Assistance provide a wealth of data to give insight into your security programs and buyer behavior.
Buyer insights
Know where to focus efforts by understanding where (and how) buyers interact with the Trust Center. Organizations can look at engagement metrics like views, access requests, account activity, and document interactions — or, look at more granular statistics like approved/denied/pending requests, along with access approval rate and time to approve.
Security ROI
Communicate the impact of security and trust programs by tying Trust Center engagement into security-driven revenue. SafeBase's dashboards showcase the ROI of security investments (via the Trust Center), so team efforts can be connected to ARR, pipeline, and deal velocity cross-functionally with sales.
Prioritization
Our platform helps organizations calculate projected effort vs. impact on the questionnaire side. The Revenue and Deals dashboards in Analytics highlight won and open deals, showing how security has influenced deals and where current opportunities exist to work with sales. This helps set priorities toward the strongest business outcomes first.
Trust Centers > Security Questionnaires
Security-minded organizations are facing a growing problem: what do we do about security questionnaires? To improve the security questionnaire process (as it exists) is to solve the immediate need of your organization, while the outcomes of investing in a Trust Center are clear:
- Fewer questionnaires with a comprehensive platform
- Easier questionnaires (for the ones you do get)
- Faster, more reliable security communication
While we're adamant about a future with no security questionnaires, we're empathetic to the current needs of security-minded organizations. Our Trust Center platform improves the security review process, whether it's solving current needs (security questionnaires) or future ones (building proactive security postures).
Organizations can finally move beyond an outdated, Band-Aid fix for security and trust communication by reducing the prevalence of, latency in, and dependence on security questionnaires with SafeBase's Trust Center platform.
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