TPRM

Vendor Risk Management When Every Tool Is a Vendor

Traditional TPRM assumes a handful of strategic suppliers. Modern stacks have hundreds. Here is how to triage without drowning.

By Hani BraishMarch 25, 20265 min read

If you treat every SaaS tool like a strategic vendor, you will spend more on questionnaires than on engineering.

Triage by blast radius

Sort vendors by what they could do on their worst day:

Tier A: Direct access to customer data or production systems.
Tier B: Access to employee identity or internal communications.
Tier C: Everything else.

Tier A gets a real review every year. Tier B gets a lightweight review every other year. Tier C gets a security.txt check and a SOC 2 report on file.

What to stop doing

Sending 300-question SIG Lite forms to a four-person startup. They will lie or ignore you, and you will have learned nothing either way.

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