UpGuard Release Notes

This release includes two brand new features which will help accelerate and streamline your vendor management and risk assessment processes.

Custom Attributes

Store additional structured information to help manage the relationship with your vendors and easily sort and group them by common characteristics. This will enable more effective vendor management within the UpGuard platform.

You can define the custom attributes you need, so you can store the information that’s important to your organization. For example, use custom attributes such as Internal Owner, Contract End Date and Cost Center to help manage your vendor relationships within the UpGuard platform.

Check out How to use Custom Vendor Attributes for help setting up and getting the most out of this feature.

Questionnaire Autofill

Filling out questionnaires can be a time-consuming and repetitive task. To greatly reduce the time involved, we are introducing a Questionnaire Autofill feature that scans previous questionnaire responses from a vendor’s organization and suggests autofill answers. Respondents can then easily review previous responses and use them in the current questionnaire where relevant. This will help your vendors respond to questionnaires faster, making it quicker and easier for you to complete vendor risk assessments. 

To learn more about how to use this feature and how it works, check out How to autofill a questionnaire based on your previous responses.

Other improvements

• This release also includes a number of bug fixes.

Learn about new features, changes, and improvements to UpGuard this month.

For this release we've focused on delivering improvements to executive/board-level reporting. You can now create reports that are specifically tailored to this audience, with the appropriate level of detail and information.

Some of these improvements include:

• Reworking the way in which you interact with the ‘Reports’ navigation menu item. You can now see a library of reports that can be generated on the platform.
• A new Board Summary report is now available. This provides a high level snapshot of key factors around your organization’s cyber security posture, including company risk rating, industry average, and severity of risks. This is a quick and easy way to share key information with your executive team and other interested parties.
• Improved Vendor Summary and Breachsight Executive Summary reports are now available. These give you the option to generate:

          - Predefined summarized versions of the original Vendor and Breachsight Reports, providing a snapshot of key information for your executives.

           - Detailed versions of the reports, which allow you to customize and display all the information your cybersecurity team might need to identify and reduce your third party risks.

For more information on the new reporting features in UpGuard, check out ‘Reporting in UpGuard Cyber Risk’.

Other improvements

• Subsidiaries are now filtered in alphabetical order, rather than the order they were added/detected.
• The visibility status of each question is now provided in the excel export of a questionnaire.
• This release includes a number of bug fixes.

We’ve added a risk matrix to the Vendor Risk Executive Summary that measures vendor security ratings by business impact. This enables you to quickly focus on the most impactful areas of your third party risk management program by visualizing your vendor portfolio risk by Security Rating and Tier.

This feature will help drive action where it matters most, highlighting the vendors of highest concern in the top right of the matrix. You can then click through on each cell to see a filtered list of these vendors and start reducing your cyber risk with maximum impact.

For help setting up tiering to get the most out of this feature, check out ‘How to tier your vendors in UpGuard’.

Other improvements

• We’ve included ‘Reassessment date’ on the vendor page Excel export. The date is set when completing a risk assessment for a vendor.
• This release includes a number of bug fixes.

Previously released only to a beta group, the vendor relationship questionnaire feature is now available to all UpGuard Vendor Risk customers. 

To streamline internal collaboration and quickly understand the level of depth required when assessing a new vendor, you can now send a vendor relationship questionnaire to the relevant members of your organization. This enables you to gather and store key information about how you work with your vendors from within Vendor Risk. 

Visit how to use vendor relationship questionnaires to learn how you can set up and use this feature. 

If you would like to join our beta program for early access to future features, please talk to your Technical Account Manager or contact support@upguard.com.

Other improvements

• You can now filter Vendor Risk questionnaires by status. This enables you to quickly filter your view – for example, to see all questionnaires that are currently in review. 
• This release also includes a number of bug fixes.

Learn about new features, changes, and improvements to UpGuard this month:

We have made it easier for you to communicate with your vendors using in-line messages and notes when sending and completing questionnaires.

To drive collaboration and streamline the process, you can now add messages to individual questions within a questionnaire, making it easier to seek clarification on any responses. You will be able to communicate directly with vendors and provide specific instruction on individual questions, allowing vendors to easily seek information from you to speed up the whole process.

This enhancement also allows you to add private notes to individual questions that are only visible to users in your organization. 

These features were previously only available at the overall questionnaire level.

To learn more about how this works you can visit Adding and viewing messages and notes in Security Questionnaires.

Features moving out of Beta

The following features, previously available in limited beta, are now more widely available to Vendor Risk customers as part of this release:

• The ‘Monitor Vendor’ page has a new look, which enables you to efficiently manage your vendors, by allowing you to review and edit vendor information, add the vendor to portfolios, add vendor tiering and labels, and trigger a vendor relationship questionnaire when onboarding a new vendor.
• Vendor portfolios, which allow you to efficiently group monitored organizations into seperate lists for easier management. You will be able to add up to 5 portfolios as part of this release (moved to open beta for all vendor risk customers on Starter, Professional, Corporate and Enterprise plans). For help setting up and using vendor portfolios, you can visit How to use portfolios to segment your vendors.

Other improvements

• This release includes a number of bug fixes

The Vendor Relationship Questionnaire streamlines the process for capturing all relevant  information when onboarding a new vendor, and the new Vendor Portfolios ensures easier categorization and vendor management in addition to the already existing labels and vendor tiering features.

Both of these features have been released to our beta customers ahead of the full release. Please talk to your Technical Account Manager or contact support@upguard.com to find out how to join our beta program to gain early access to these features.

Vendor Relationship Questionnaire

Streamline collaboration within your organization when onboarding a new vendor with the Vendor Relationship Questionnaire. This feature enables you to gather and store key information from the people managing the vendor relationship, allowing you to simplify the overall risk assessment process.

For help with setting up and using your Vendor Relationship Questionnaire you can visit How to use vendor relationship questionnaires.

Vendor Portfolios

You can now efficiently group monitored organizations into seperate lists using the portfolios feature. Portfolios allow you to limit access so that individual users within your team only see the vendors relevant to them. Once setup, this feature allows you to:

• Easily filter, view and report the performance of  individual portfolios
• Maintain and report on separate vendor portfolios for different departments or groups within your organization
• Manage permissions so that users only have access to the portfolios and vendors they need.

For help with setting up and using Vendor Portfolios you can visit How to use portfolios to segment your vendors.

Other improvements

• This release includes a number of bug fixes

Learn about new features, changes, and improvements to UpGuard this month.

We’ve made it easier to quickly find questionnaires, with upgrades to the existing ‘Search Questionnaires’ functionality. 

This includes the ability to search by:

• Vendor name
• Sender name
• Questionnaire name
• Questionnaire type

You can also apply ‘vendor name’ as a filter, in addition to tier, label and score.  For help sending a security questionnaire to your vendors, you can visit ‘How to send security questionnaires in UpGuard Vendor Risk’.

Other improvements

• Added a 'Remediation' flag to the questionnaire API output 
• Other bug fixes

You now have the flexibility to send tailored notifications to any email address, including other domains, recipients who are not UpGuard users, and group addresses such as security@mycompany.com.

Building the right notification process is critical when securing your company and customer data. By setting up an email integration, this allows you: 

• The flexibility to automatically notify any email address when a specific event occurs, such as when a new domain or IP is added to your company for verification by the IT department.
• The ability to customize the messaging for each notification, to provide the required context and information.

For help setting up an email integration, check out 'How to create an email integration in UpGuard'.

Request remediation on shared profile questionnaires

Creating a shared profile is a great way to proactively share your organization’s security posture and related documentation with current and prospective vendors to expedite the assessment process. Now, when you have been provided access to a questionnaire through a shared profile, you can request remediation of these risks directly. For more information, see 'How to remediate risks from shared questionnaires'.

Other improvements

• This release includes a number of bug fixes

Learn about new features, changes, and improvements to UpGuard this month.