If you’re a security analyst, you know the work never stops. Even after your team completes an extensive vendor risk assessment and remediation, you still need to write a report to share your findings with key stakeholders.
And this work isn’t a walk in the park by any means. Writing a risk assessment report often requires hours (or even days) of summarizing information, repopulating graphs, and balancing technical details with clarity to cater to technical and non-technical stakeholders. This manual process is time-intensive, prone to errors, and highly frustrating.
But it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. What if you could eliminate most of this manual work from your to-do list? What if your risk assessment reports essentially wrote themselves?
This article is part four of our blog series covering the most difficult challenges security teams face when completing vendor risk assessments. Keep reading to learn how UpGuard Vendor Risk and its range of AI-powered solutions are helping security teams finally overcome long-withstanding hurdles, decrease their manual work, and write contextual assessment reports in under 60 seconds.
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The Problem: Manual Report Writing Inefficiencies and a Scenario Every Security Analyst Dreads
Let’s set the scene:
You just completed a manual assessment of a critical tier 1 vendor with network access. The assessment and risk management process’ were excruciatingly slow, with your vendor offering little support.
But that’s behind you now, and all that remains to close out this task is drafting the final assessment report. It’s a process that has always been tedious and time-consuming, but you just have to put your head down and get it done.
Writing these reports requires summarizing countless findings, reflecting on previous remediation activities, and repopulating critical graphs, tables, and risk summaries. It’s a repetitive, manual job that begins to eat up hours of your work week.
What’s worse is the manual nature of this work, which makes it incredibly easy to miss key details or introduce errors. Even the slightest oversight could undermine the effectiveness of an entire report. After all, this document is supposed to serve as the foundation for crucial decisions across your organization and will eventually fall under auditor scrutiny.
Striking the perfect balance between technical detail and accessibility is another significant challenge. The report must cater to technical and non-technical stakeholders, but this is hard to do without a standardized format. This lack of formatting also makes it hard to track trends over time or ensure consistency.
The stakes are high: a poorly crafted report could unintentionally greenlight a vendor who don’t meet security standards—and worse, put you in the hot seat when an auditor challenges the completeness, accuracy, or justification of your findings., leaving your organization vulnerable. As you finish your draft for the first report, you can’t help but wonder if there’s a better way to streamline this process.
“It usually takes me at least a few days to turn around a report. It's a lot of copying and pasting from the questionnaire into my Word document. Then, I’ll have to write background paragraphs, confirm impact levels, check risk severity, etc.”
The Solution: Crafting Actionable Assessment Reports with UpGuard’s AI
We get it—writing risk assessment reports can often feel like the most tedious part of the process.
But what if you could eliminate this manual work entirely?
UpGuard’s AI-Powered Security Profile delivers consistent, actionable assessment reports every time, reducing days of manual work down to a few minutes.
Instant Risk Assessments
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Manual report writing is riddled with inefficiencies. UpGuard Vendor Risk and its AI-powered Instant Risk Assessments eliminate these inefficiencies and the burden of manual work. Security teams can generate detailed, accurate point-in-time risk assessment reports in less than 60 seconds.
Say “goodbye” to manually summarizing data, repopulating tables and graphs, and spending days ensuring your reports are accurate and readable. UpGuard’s Instant Risk Assessments enable security teams to receive comprehensive reports every time.
Built for Speed and Scale
Security professionals can only be effective if they have the mobility to apply their expertise where it’s needed when it’s needed. Unfortunately, manual assessments and security questionnaires have long depleted security teams' bandwidth. This challenge only magnifies when security teams must deal with multiple vendors and large amounts of data simultaneously.
Stakeholder-friendly Summaries
UpGuard also eliminates the stress of communicating complex findings to a diverse array of stakeholders (even the non-technical ones). UpGuard’s AI automatically translates complex risk data into clear, actionable insights with every report. The platform then organizes the most important insights into a stakeholder-friendly summary to help teams and key decision-makers align.
Standardized Formatting
When security teams complete risk reports manually, the structure and details of these reports can vary. This lack of a standardized format may be a more serious problem than you initially think. Without a standardized reporting structure, it can be difficult to track trends and compare assessments over time. It can also hinder a stakeholder’s comprehension as they move from one report to the next.
In-depth and Error-free Reports
Manual report writing drastically increases the potential for human error. Even the most skilled analysts could accidentally miss a key finding or introduce inconsistent data while copying and pasting from several documents.
UpGuard eliminates these risks almost entirely. The platform’s AI is purpose-built to automatically analyze your in-scope compliance and risk management activities to generate accurate and high-quality report commentary at the click of a button. Therefore, by using UpGuard you can ensure that your reports are always up-to-date, complete, and free from mistakes.
Fully Customizable
UpGuard understands that every organization has its unique requirements and every risk assessment is different. Unlike the rigid report templates some solutions use, UpGuard’s reports are fully customizable to fit your specific needs. Whether you want to, adjust the report layout, or refine content, the platform provides tremendous flexibility.
5 Major Third-Party Risk Management Challenges Fixed with AI
Navigate this crowded landscape by diving into the top five challenges in third-party risk management and explaining how the right AI-driven solution can make all the difference.
Overcoming Report Writing Hurdles With UpGuard Vendor Risk
Ready to elevate your team’s risk assessment reports?
Book your free UpGuard demo today, and check our exclusive, on-demand AI webinar to learn more about UpGuard’s AI features.
This article was part four of our five-part blog series covering the toughest challenges security teams face. In our next article, we will discuss continuous vendor monitoring.
