The Vendor Assurance Confidence Gap: Why It’s Widest With Your Most Critical Vendors

Vendor assurance efforts are increasing, but risk leaders don’t trust the results of that effort. In KPMG’s Global Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) Survey, only 15% of risk leaders said they have high confidence in the data that underpins their TPRM program. Only 17% rate their data quality as excellent. Security teams are running more assessments and sending more questionnaires than ever, but fewer than one in five leaders trust what any of that produces.

Why the gap is widest with core and cloud vendors specifically

Core and cloud providers rarely fit a standard questionnaire-led review. Ask a large vendor to complete a bespoke security questionnaire, and the answer is often a trust page and a SOC 2 report rather than a completed form. However, this isn’t evasiveness on the vendor’s side. These providers serve thousands of customers, and building a bespoke response for each of them doesn’t scale.

The problem is that this is also the vendor category carrying the most inherited risk. A core or cloud provider is often positioned close to your infrastructure, identity systems, data, and uptime. When something goes wrong with that layer, it doesn’t stay contained to one team or process. It cascades.

Regulators have started naming this category directly rather than leaving it to organizations to work out on their own:

• The UK’s Critical Third Parties regime took effect on January 1, 2025, under rules from the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PS24/16) to manage systemic concentration risks.
• The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) became fully applicable on January 17, 2025, to establish uniform rules for third-party oversight.
• The European Supervisory Authorities designated the first 19 critical information and communications technology (ICT) providers under the regime in November 2025 to subject cloud and telecom vendors to EU-level oversight.

These regulations all point to the same category of vendor: the ones whose failures carry systemic, not just individual, consequences. The vendors drawing the most regulatory attention right now are often the same ones organizations assess with the least rigor because a SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certificate appeared on the vendor’s trust page, which is assumed enough for teams to close out the review.

What’s eroding trust

Three issues are doing most of the damage, and none of them are new. They’re problems that haven’t scaled with the size and complexity of a modern vendor ecosystem.

Self-attested, static questionnaires

A completed questionnaire may look finished, but that doesn’t mean it’s verified. Every answer on a security questionnaire is the vendor’s own “yes” or “no” against a requirement, not independent proof that a control exists or works. Teams can wave a fully answered form through without the scrutiny it still needs, especially when it looks more authoritative than a collection of raw evidence. And once someone signs and files it, nothing about it updates. The vendor’s environment continues to change, but the questionnaire doesn’t.

Coverage blind spots

Most assessment programs still work on an annual or biannual cadence, or vendors are only assessed at renewal. This results in two issues. Formal reviews happen infrequently enough that a vendor’s security posture and risk can change significantly more than this affords.

New and emerging risks

A questionnaire someone built two or three years ago doesn’t account for today’s threat landscape. Supply chain risk from sub-processors, AI-specific exposure, cloud-native attack surfaces, and fourth-party dependencies are all risk categories that some legacy assessment approaches never accounted for. A vendor can pass a review built on an outdated set of questions and still carry risk.

What rebuilds confidence

Confidence doesn’t return through more paperwork. It’s restored through evidence. When a team maps evidence to a recognized, purpose-built assessment framework, the result is more defensible than a self-attested generic questionnaire because an auditor can trace the conclusion back to something concrete. Limiting follow-up to genuine gaps, rather than resending a full questionnaire, keeps the process fast without making it any less rigorous. If evidence already answers a question, nothing productive comes from asking the vendor to answer it again.

Continuous monitoring closes the other half of the gap, which is the space between formal assessments. A point-in-time review is only ever a snapshot, and a vendor’s security posture can change the next week. Regulation is starting to catch up on this specifically. The ICT risk management requirements of DORA call for ongoing monitoring of third-party providers, not only reassessment at renewal. A program that can show continuous oversight between formal reviews has an answer for a question that self-attested paperwork can’t: what changed since the last time we looked, and did anyone notice?

These questions are the real test of credibility with a board or an auditor. It isn’t enough to state a conclusion. A program earns trust by showing which evidence it used, which controls it checked, which gaps remained, and whether the residual risk was treated, accepted within tolerance by the right owner, or monitored.

The bigger picture: A whole assurance landscape, not one framework

No single framework covers a core or cloud vendor’s full risk picture. These vendors sit within a landscape of standards, each addressing a different layer of risk. Frameworks such as the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) and its accompanying Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) cover cloud-specific controls that address aspects of cloud risk in ways a general-purpose framework may skim past. They cover multi-tenancy isolation, virtualization security, cryptographic key management, and identity and access management at the infrastructure layer. 

Cyber hygiene baselines establish a foundational level of security posture. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Controls does this in the US. UK Cyber Essentials plays the same role in the UK, and the Essential Eight fills it in for Australia. Higher-rigor standards support more comprehensive assessment for more complex vendors with greater dependency. NIST SP 800-53 and ISO 27001 are common choices here, and NIST CSF 2.0 is becoming more prevalent, too. 

Here’s how UpGuard Vendor Risk’s new framework-aligned support fits into the broader landscape:

CAIQ and CCM, NIST SP 800-53, and UK Cyber Essentials extend an already broad evidence model into core and cloud-specific assurance and widen the lens. They aren’t the whole answer on their own, but what matters is whether a program can move an assessment across all of these layers using the same evidence base, rather than starting over each time the required lens changes.

Your core and cloud vendors shouldn’t be harder to assess. Explore how UpGuard Vendor Risk’s new frameworks close the assurance gap with a product walkthrough.

What closing the gap looks like operationally

Closing the confidence gap consistently is difficult without purpose-built software. Analysts must collect evidence from SOC 2 reports, trust centers, policies, and questionnaires, determine which requirements it supports, identify what remains unverified, and repeat much of that work whenever the assessment framework changes. At scale, that becomes slow, inconsistent, and difficult to defend.

The right TPRM software turns that fragmented work into a traceable assessment workflow. AI can parse evidence and map it to relevant controls in minutes, compressing work that previously took analysts hours to complete. Each finding remains linked to its source, so teams can see which controls have sufficient support, which require further review, and which gaps need targeted follow-up. Rather than sending another full questionnaire, the team asks only for the evidence or responses still needed to reach a defensible conclusion.

The resulting assessment records more than whether the vendor passed a review. It shows the evidence considered, the controls assessed, the gaps identified, the resulting residual risk, and whether that risk was treated, accepted within tolerance by the appropriate risk owner, or placed under ongoing monitoring. The report can then map directly to the framework that a board member, auditor, or regulator expects to see, without requiring someone to reconstruct the reasoning after the fact.

That oversight should continue after the formal assessment. Continuous monitoring can surface new vulnerabilities, security posture changes, incidents, and other material risk signals as they emerge, rather than waiting for the next annual review. This is what turns vendor assurance from a point-in-time judgment into an ongoing risk-management process: a current, traceable body of evidence and decisions, rather than a form that begins aging as soon as it is filed.

Put evidence-backed assurance to work

Closing the vendor assurance confidence gap involves providing every core and cloud vendor with an assessment that organizations can rely on, grounded in evidence rather than assumptions. Operationally, this starts with treating evidence as the foundation of the assessment. A framework earns trust only when the evidence behind it holds up under scrutiny, and a report earns trust only when teams can trace every finding to something concrete. 

The vendors carrying the most risk shouldn’t be the ones getting the least rigorous review. UpGuard Vendor Risk helps teams close the gap by mapping evidence to the right framework, following up on gaps with precision, and continuously tracking security posture long after a report goes out. Explore UpGuard Vendor Risk to see how evidence-backed assurance works for your most critical vendors.