With technology supply chain risks at an all-time high, many governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams conduct formal risk assessments as part of their new vendor selection and onboarding processes. Audit-based reporting frameworks like SOC 2 are invaluable to these efforts, as they provide a consistent way to benchmark prospective vendors’ customer data management practices. The challenge is that SOC 2 reports, while vital, are extremely lengthy and time-consuming for GRC personnel to review manually.
Bitsight Vendor Risk Management’s (VRM) latest enhancement – Instant Insights – from the Bitsight IQ suite of AI-based capabilities, leverages AI techniques to surface and summarize the most important details from vendor-provided SOC 2 reports. With Instant Insights, GRC teams can work more efficiently through the vendor onboarding and assessment process, ultimately responding to requests from business stakeholders more quickly.
Key takeaways
- SOC 2 reports are vital for assessing vendors’ customer data management practices, but their length and complexity place a significant administrative burden on GRC teams.
- Instant Insights for SOC 2, which is now included in Bitsight VRM, uses AI to reduce SOC 2 document review time from hours to minutes.
- Instant Insights is an additional efficiency lever customers can pull, complementing existing “built for speed” capabilities like workflow automations, prepopulated vendor profiles, and real-world vendor risk observations.
- Activation is fully optional and controlled by users. The feature runs in an isolated cloud environment and does not use customer or vendor data to train AI models.
The growing administrative burden of SOC 2 reviews: Why manual vendor SOC 2 reviews don't scale
Organizations across industries now rely on SaaS offerings to support many aspects of their day-to-day operations. The trade-off, however, is that sensitive information must often be stored in SaaS providers’ infrastructure in order to use these platforms to their full potential.
The SOC 2 framework gives SaaS providers and other vendors storing customer data a detailed and consistent way to demonstrate that they have sound practices in place for managing and securing customer data. For this reason, SOC 2 report reviews have become a key element of most third-party risk management programs.
While this practice is essential for many organizations, it puts a significant administrative burden on GRC teams, which is only growing as the number of SaaS offerings requested by business teams multiplies and existing vendors reach their due date for re-assessment.
What compliance gaps should you look for in a vendor SOC 2 report?
A SOC 2 report can run to dozens of pages, but most compliance gaps sit in a handful of places. Reviewers who know where to look can assess a report far faster than reading it end to end. The items below are where issues most often hide, and they are the sections worth checking first in every vendor SOC 2 review. Bitsight Instant Insights surfaces key details from the report with page references, so reviewers can jump straight to the source text for each item.
- Report type: a Type I report assesses control design at a point in time, while a Type II report tests whether controls operated effectively over a period.
- Audit period: confirm the period is recent, and request a bridge letter if it ended several months ago.
- Scope: check which systems, services and locations are included, and whether the service you use is among them.
- Auditor's opinion: a qualified or adverse opinion signals that controls did not meet the criteria.
- Exceptions: review any testing deviations and the vendor's management response to each.
- Complementary user entity controls: these are controls your own organization must operate for the vendor's controls to work.
- Subservice organizations: note any carved-out providers, since their controls are not tested in the report.
How Instant Insights for SOC 2 streamlines vendor assessments
Instant Insights for SOC 2 is a new feature that is available to Bitsight VRM customers at no additional cost. It uses advanced AI techniques to:
- Analyze and summarize SOC 2 documentation submitted by vendors
- Surface key insights and present them in an easy-to-consume view
- Provide reference points or page numbers to more detailed information in the original source document, which can be viewed in a side-by-side companion screen
How can AI extract controls from vendor security documents?
AI document analysis reads vendor security documentation such as SOC 2 reports and questionnaires, identifies the controls described, and organizes them so reviewers can assess coverage without manual extraction. Bitsight applies this in two ways. Instant Insights summarizes SOC 2 reports and links each insight to its page in the source document. Bitsight Framework Intelligence goes a step further, analyzing SOC 2 reports, questionnaires and audit documents and mapping that evidence to frameworks such as SIG, NIST and ISO. Reviewers should still verify AI output against the source, which Instant Insights supports through side-by-side viewing.
Our commitment to data privacy and responsible AI
As with any AI capability, efficiency gains must be balanced with the need to independently verify critical data insights for accuracy. With quick reference points from summarized insights, customers can easily verify AI generated information with the uploaded SOC 2, which is always a best practice when leveraging generative AI.
Instant Insights operates on a private enterprise tenant of Google’s Vertex AI platform. All SOC 2 documentation analysis is conducted in this fully isolated environment, and no data from the analysis process is used to train the underlying Vertex AI models.
Finally, use of Instant Insights for SOC 2 is entirely optional. Bitsight administrators can enable or disable AI analysis at any time with one click on the Account Settings page.
A systematic approach to vendor risk management: Reviewing SOC 2 reports across many vendors
To review SOC 2 reports from hundreds of vendors, Bitsight pairs Instant Insights with its wider VRM capabilities:
- Automated and customizable vendor assessment workflows
- Pre-populated profiles of over 75,000 vendors to accelerate data collection
- Validation of vendor-reported security practices with real-world data and observations
By enabling a more systematic and scalable approach to vendor risk management, Bitsight VRM empowers your GRC personnel to work more efficiently and maximize their impact on your organization’s risk posture.
Explore an interactive tour of Instant Insights here or request a Bitsight VRM demo.
