Vendor Risk Scoring

What is vendor risk scoring?

Vendor risk scoring is the process of assigning a numerical or categorical score to third-party vendors based on the potential risk they pose to your organization. This score reflects areas like data access, financial stability, security posture, regulatory exposure, and operational resilience.

Put simply, it’s how you quantify “how risky is this vendor to our business?”

Why it matters

When every department is buying software, you need a fast way to assess risk — without doing a full audit on every tool. Vendor risk scores help you prioritize who to review closely, who needs deeper due diligence, and who’s likely low-risk.

It also helps you:

• Flag vendors that require extra legal or security review
  
  

• Build compliance workflows (especially for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR)
  
  

• Report on third-party risk exposure to internal stakeholders and auditors
  
  
  

How scoring works

Scoring can be done manually (via questionnaires and reviews) or automatically (via risk platforms and public data). Some teams use a traffic light system (low, medium, high), while others use a numerical scale (e.g. 0–100).

Common scoring criteria include:

• Type and sensitivity of data shared
  
  

• Access to internal systems or PII
  
  

• Cloud infrastructure and hosting setup
  
  

• Financial health and business continuity
  
  

• Incident history or breach reports
  
  

• Regulatory or geographic risk exposure
  
  

Best practices

• Use automated data sources when possible (e.g. security ratings, breach databases)
  
  

• Tie score thresholds to actions (e.g. high-risk vendors require InfoSec approval)
  
  

• Reassess vendors annually — risk changes over time
  
  

• Centralize scores in your vendor management system so teams can act on them
  
  

• Automate almost all of the busywork with BRM

How BRM Helps You Tame Vendor Risk—Automagically

BRM gives finance, compliance, and legal teams an AI-first way to understand and control vendor risk without doing any of the manual work. The moment you connect, BRM’s superagents find every vendor, contract, and risk-relevant artifact across your systems, unify them into a single record, and apply your compliance rules automatically. Instead of chasing questionnaires, tracking down SOC 2s, or policing intake, BRM handles the legwork, so you can make faster, safer vendor decisions with total confidence. Plus, all compliance and risk information is kept up-to-date by BRM’s agents.

BRM helps you wrangle and automate vendor risk by:

• Automatically discovering every vendor and contract
  BRM pulls agreements, spend, ownership, certifications, and access details into one living vendor record—giving finance, compliance, and legal teams immediate clarity into risk exposure.
  
  

• Applying compliance and risk rules without manual work
  Every new vendor request is routed through your customizable guardrails. BRM’s agents collect DPAs, SOC 2s, subprocessors, security docs, and risk signals automatically, keeping your audit posture airtight.
  
  

• Surfacing risk and renewals before they become problems
  Real-time alerts highlight high-risk vendors, upcoming renewals, missing compliance artifacts, and duplicate or shadow tools, so teams can act proactively instead of reacting under deadline pressure.
  
  
  

Additional resources

• NIST Vendor Risk Management Guidelines

• Shared Assessments Standardized Information Gathering (SIG)

• ISO/IEC 27036-3:2013 — Guidelines for supplier relationships

What's next?

If you want to automate away your vendor risk busywork, reach out to BRM for a demo.