Instant Insights for SOC 2 Reporting: Using AI to Streamline Vendor Assessments

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 t workflow automations, prepopulated vendor profiles, and real-world vendor risk observations.
• This new feature allows users to control its activation is completely optional, operates 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

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.

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

 

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

Instant Insights for SOC 2 integrates seamlessly with Bitsight VRM’s broader third-party risk management capabilities, which include:

• Automated and customizable vendor assessment workflows
• Pre-populated profiles of over 50,000 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.