Vendor Security Review & Questionnaire Support for Consulting & Advisory Firms

Borrow one. The efficient path is a specialist who has answered these instruments many times mapping your actual controls to the question set, drafting responses, and flagging the handful where remediation should precede submission. The first pass builds a reusable answer base; subsequent questionnaires become delta exercises measured in hours. What to avoid is aspirational answering, describing controls you intend to have, because a client audit or an incident will convert those answers into misrepresentations.

Yes, that outbound review is half the service. We inventory the estate, from file sharing and surveys through PSA, e-signature and AI tools, tier each by the sensitivity of what flows through it, and assess the top tier on hosting jurisdiction, security attestations, retention and deletion behaviour, subprocessors and breach-notification terms. Output is a decision list for leadership: keep, keep with configuration changes, contract fixes to demand at renewal, or replace. Quebec-linked data flags the pre-transfer assessment Law 25 expects.

At minimum: confidentiality at least as strict as your client obligations, restrictions on further subcontracting without consent, safeguard requirements matching data sensitivity, an incident-notification duty to you within a defined short window, return-or-destroy at engagement end, and audit or attestation rights proportionate to the subcontractor's size. B-10-influenced clients increasingly ask to see these arrangements, so the clauses need to exist in signed agreements, not in intentions. We provide the standard language and the vetting checklist to pair with it.

Before adoption, emphatically. AI vendors vary more than any other category on the questions that matter to a consultancy: whether inputs train models, how long prompts are retained, whether enterprise tenancy isolates your data, and where processing happens. A brief structured assessment answers those from the vendor's own documentation and terms, then feeds your AI-use policy's approved list. The same record also arms you for the client questionnaires that now probe advisor AI practices directly.

Client-mandated platforms, their VDI, their data room, their collaboration suite, sit outside your vetting authority but inside your risk. You cannot assess them the way you assess your own vendors, so the control shifts to conduct and contract: document that the tool is client-imposed, follow the client's rules inside it, keep exports governed by your data-handling policy, and ensure your MSA does not leave you liable for the client's own platform. We help firms record these arrangements so reviewers see deliberate handling rather than a gap.