Free Vendor Risk Assessment Template including Questionnaire

Updated August 2026: This article was originally published in July 2024 and has been comprehensively updated to include AI/ML vendor security questionnaires, supply chain security assessments, continuous monitoring vs. point-in-time evaluations, and modern VRM tooling recommendations as of 2026.

Introduction: What Is a Vendor Risk Assessment?

A vendor risk assessment (VRA) is a structured process organizations use to identify, evaluate, and manage the potential risks introduced by engaging third-party vendors. Whether a vendor provides cloud hosting, payroll processing, marketing analytics, or AI-powered services, they represent an extension of your organization’s attack surface. A VRA helps you understand what security controls a vendor has in place, where gaps exist, and whether the residual risk is acceptable given your organization’s tolerance and regulatory obligations.

VRA vs. Third-Party Risk Assessment

These terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a meaningful distinction. A vendor risk assessment focuses specifically on suppliers who deliver products or services under a contractual agreement — think SaaS providers, managed service providers, staffing agencies, or infrastructure vendors. The scope typically covers supply chain risks, financial stability, data security practices, and service continuity.

A third-party risk assessment (TPRA) casts a wider net. It encompasses all external entities that interact with your organization, including joint venture partners, affiliates, resellers, consultants, and even open-source communities your engineering teams depend on. TPRA evaluates operational, reputational, environmental, geopolitical, and regulatory risks beyond what a traditional vendor assessment covers.

The simplest mental model: vendor risk management (VRM) is a focused subset of third-party risk management (TPRM). Every VRA is a form of TPRA, but not every TPRA is limited to vendors.

What Is a VRA Questionnaire?

A vendor risk assessment questionnaire is a standardized set of questions designed to gather structured information from a vendor about their security controls, compliance certifications, data handling practices, and overall risk posture. The questionnaire serves as the primary data collection mechanism in your VRM program — it transforms subjective vendor claims into comparable, evaluable responses that inform risk scoring and decision-making.

Well-designed VRA questionnaires accomplish several objectives:

• Establish a baseline for comparing vendors across similar service categories
• Surface control gaps that require remediation or contractual mitigation
• Demonstrate due diligence to auditors, regulators, and your board
• Create a repeatable process that scales as your vendor portfolio grows
• Feed into risk registers for ongoing monitoring and periodic reassessment

In this guide, we provide a comprehensive VRA questionnaire template spanning six critical domains: information security and privacy, physical and data center security, web application security, infrastructure security, AI/ML vendor security, and supply chain security.

Note: This questionnaire is industry-agnostic. Organizations should adapt these questions based on their regulatory environment, risk appetite, and the specific services each vendor provides.

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Information Security and Privacy Questionnaire

This section evaluates a vendor’s foundational security program — their policies, access controls, encryption practices, incident response capabilities, and compliance posture.

1. Do you maintain a written information security policy that addresses data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and how frequently is it reviewed and updated?
2. What access controls do you have in place to restrict access to sensitive data (e.g., role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, just-in-time access provisioning)?
3. How do you encrypt data at rest and in transit, and what encryption standards and key management practices do you follow?
4. What procedures do you have in place for vulnerability management, including identification, prioritization, patching, and remediation timelines?
5. How do you monitor your systems for security threats and incidents, and what detection tools or SIEM platforms are deployed?
6. Do you have a documented incident response plan for handling data breaches and other security incidents, and when was it last tested?
7. How do you train your employees on information security best practices, and what is the frequency of training?
8. Do you conduct regular security awareness training, including phishing simulations and social engineering exercises?
9. Are you compliant with relevant industry regulations or data privacy laws (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001)?
10. How do you handle data subject requests including access, rectification, portability, and erasure under applicable privacy laws?
11. Do you have a documented data retention and disposal policy, and how do you ensure secure deletion of customer data upon contract termination?
12. How frequently do you conduct penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, and are they performed by independent third parties?
13. Do you have a third-party risk management program to assess the security posture of your own vendors and subprocessors?
14. Are you willing to undergo a security audit by an independent third party at the customer’s request?
15. How do you ensure the security of your cloud infrastructure, including configuration management, identity governance, and workload isolation?

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Physical and Data Center Security Questionnaire

Physical security remains a critical control layer, particularly for vendors hosting sensitive data or operating infrastructure on behalf of your organization.

1. Do you own and operate your own data centers, or do you utilize colocation providers or public cloud infrastructure?
2. In what geographical locations and legal jurisdictions are your data centers situated?
3. What physical security measures are in place at your data centers (e.g., perimeter fencing, bollards, security cameras, mantrap entries, access control systems)?
4. How is access to the data center perimeter and interior zones controlled (e.g., key cards, biometric authentication, multi-person integrity)?
5. Do you have 24/7 on-site security personnel at your data centers?
6. What environmental controls are in place to protect against fire, flooding, power failure, and other natural or man-made disasters?
7. How is the physical security of your data centers monitored, and what is the retention period for security logs and video surveillance footage?
8. Do you have a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan in place for your data centers, and when was it last tested?
9. How is your data center infrastructure maintained, including regular maintenance schedules, intrusion detection systems, and tamper-evident controls?
10. What procedures govern visitor access to your data centers, including escort requirements, identification verification, and access logging?
11. Are your data centers subject to independent security audits or certifications (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, SSAE 18)?
12. Do you perform background checks on all data center personnel, including contractors and maintenance staff?
13. How do you handle the secure disposal of electronic waste and decommissioned hardware, including chain-of-custody documentation?
14. Can you provide a detailed description of your data center security architecture, including network segmentation and zone isolation?
15. Are you willing to offer a virtual or physical tour of your data center facilities upon request?

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Web Application Security Questionnaire

For vendors delivering web-based services, the security of their application layer directly impacts your organization’s exposure to data breaches and service disruptions.

1. Does your application enforce TLS with a valid certificate, and what is your minimum supported TLS version to prevent protocol downgrade and man-in-the-middle attacks?
2. Do you follow a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) that incorporates security requirements, threat modeling, secure coding standards, and security testing at each phase?
3. What tools and methodologies do you use for static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and software composition analysis (SCA)?
4. How do you identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities in web applications, and what are your SLAs for critical and high-severity findings?
5. What web application security best practices do you enforce, including input validation, output encoding, parameterized queries, secure session management, and CSRF protection?
6. Do you offer web application security scanning or penetration testing services that customers can request or verify?
7. How do you patch vulnerabilities in your application frameworks, libraries, and underlying infrastructure, and what is your average time-to-patch for critical vulnerabilities?
8. What steps do you take to mitigate OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, including injection flaws, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, and server-side request forgery (SSRF)?
9. Do you have a web application firewall (WAF) deployed to protect against common web attacks, and how are its rules maintained and updated?
10. How do you monitor web application traffic for suspicious activity, abuse patterns, and anomalous behavior?
11. What is your incident response procedure specifically for web application security incidents, including customer notification timelines?
12. How do you handle data breaches that originate from web application vulnerabilities, and what forensic capabilities do you maintain?
13. Do you offer secure configuration guidance or hardening documentation for customers deploying applications on your platform?
14. How do you ensure secure coding practices within your own development teams, including code review requirements and security champion programs?
15. Are you willing to share penetration test reports, vulnerability scan summaries, or security assessment findings with customers under NDA?
16. Do you provide security documentation, API security guides, or developer resources to help customers integrate securely with your platform?

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Infrastructure Security Questionnaire

Infrastructure-level controls underpin everything above. This section assesses network architecture, compute isolation, backup strategies, and operational security.

1. Do you employ a defense-in-depth approach for your infrastructure, incorporating physical, network, host, and application security layers?
2. How are your data centers and cloud environments physically and logically secured, including segmentation between tenants?
3. How do you segment your infrastructure to isolate customer data, workloads, and management planes from one another?
4. What network security controls are deployed (e.g., next-generation firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, micro-segmentation, zero-trust network access)?
5. How do you manage and secure access to your infrastructure, including privileged access management (PAM), service account governance, and just-in-time elevation?
6. What is your process for patching and updating operating systems, hypervisors, container runtimes, and firmware across your infrastructure fleet?
7. Do you conduct regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing of your infrastructure, and how are findings tracked to resolution?
8. How do you monitor your infrastructure for suspicious activity, lateral movement, and potential security incidents in real time?
9. What disaster recovery and business continuity plans are in place for your infrastructure, including RTO and RPO commitments?
10. How do you back up customer data, how frequently are backups tested for integrity, and what is your backup retention policy?
11. What is your process for data recovery in the event of a disaster, ransomware incident, or infrastructure failure?
12. Do you offer customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK/BYOK) for data stored within your infrastructure?
13. How do you handle customer data deletion requests, and can you provide cryptographic proof of deletion upon request?
14. Are you compliant with relevant infrastructure security standards (e.g., SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CSA STAR, FedRAMP)?
15. Can you provide a detailed service-level agreement (SLA) outlining your security commitments, uptime guarantees, and performance metrics?

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AI/ML Vendor Security Questionnaire

As organizations increasingly adopt AI-powered services, new risk dimensions emerge around model security, data governance, and algorithmic accountability. This section addresses risks specific to vendors providing AI, machine learning, or large language model (LLM) capabilities.

1. How do you secure your AI/ML models against adversarial attacks, model extraction, model inversion, and unauthorized access to model weights or parameters?
2. What governance controls do you have in place for training data, including data provenance tracking, consent management, and data quality assurance?
3. What protections exist against prompt injection, jailbreaking, and other LLM-specific attack vectors in your AI-powered products?
4. How do you control and limit AI agent access to customer systems, data, and external APIs, and what guardrails prevent unintended autonomous actions?
5. What is your data usage and retention policy regarding customer inputs — specifically, do customer prompts, queries, or uploaded data get used for model training, fine-tuning, or evaluation purposes?
6. How do you test for and mitigate bias, fairness issues, and discriminatory outputs in your AI models, and how frequently are bias audits conducted?
7. Do you have AI-specific incident response procedures for scenarios such as model poisoning, training data leakage, hallucinated sensitive information, or unintended model behavior?
8. What output filtering, content moderation, and safety mechanisms are in place to prevent your AI systems from generating harmful, misleading, or policy-violating content?
9. Can you provide explainability or interpretability documentation for your AI model decisions, particularly for use cases impacting regulatory compliance or consequential decisions?
10. How do you manage model versioning, rollback capabilities, and change control when deploying updated AI models that may alter output behavior?
11. What isolation mechanisms exist between different customers’ data within your AI platform to prevent cross-tenant data leakage during inference or fine-tuning?
12. Do you maintain an AI risk register or conduct AI-specific impact assessments (e.g., aligned with the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, or ISO 42001)?
13. How do you handle intellectual property concerns, including whether customer data could inadvertently surface in outputs provided to other customers?
14. What logging and auditability mechanisms exist for AI system inputs, outputs, and decision pathways to support forensic investigation and compliance?
15. How do you ensure human oversight and intervention capabilities for AI systems operating in high-stakes or regulated environments?

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Supply Chain Security Questionnaire

Software supply chain attacks have become a primary threat vector. This section evaluates a vendor’s practices around software provenance, dependency management, and build integrity.

1. Do you generate and maintain a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for your products, and in what format (e.g., SPDX, CycloneDX) is it provided to customers?
2. How do you verify the provenance and integrity of third-party dependencies, open-source libraries, and upstream packages incorporated into your software?
3. Do you sign your container images, software packages, and release artifacts using cryptographic signatures, and can customers verify these signatures independently?
4. What is your SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts) compliance level, and how do you ensure build integrity, source integrity, and build environment isolation?
5. How do you maintain transparency into your software composition, including a process for notifying customers when critical dependencies change or are deprecated?
6. Do you conduct or commission third-party code audits of your codebase, and how frequently are security-focused code reviews performed on critical components?
7. What controls are in place to prevent compromised developer accounts, malicious insiders, or build pipeline tampering from introducing unauthorized code into production releases?
8. How do you monitor for newly disclosed vulnerabilities in your dependency tree, and what is your process and timeline for patching transitive dependency vulnerabilities?
9. Do you maintain a vulnerability disclosure program or bug bounty program that covers supply chain and dependency-related findings?
10. How do you evaluate and manage the security posture of open-source projects you depend on, including maintainer trust, project health metrics, and abandonment risk?

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How to Validate Your Vendor Risk Management Template

Security is not a set-and-forget practice. Threat actors evolve continuously, and your VRA template must evolve with them. A questionnaire that was comprehensive in 2023 may have critical blind spots in 2026 — AI risks, supply chain attacks, and zero-day exploitation timelines have all accelerated. Validating your VRM template ensures it remains effective at identifying and mitigating the risks that actually matter today.

Internal Review

• Subject Matter Expert Involvement: Engage relevant internal teams — security engineering, IT operations, legal, procurement, privacy, and compliance — to review the template for completeness and alignment with their respective domains. Each team brings a unique perspective on what risks matter most.
• Scenario Testing: Apply the template to hypothetical vendor engagements across multiple risk profiles (a low-risk marketing tool vs. a high-risk data processor vs. a critical infrastructure provider). This exercise reveals whether your template captures the nuances of different vendor tiers and data sensitivity levels.
• Benchmarking Against Frameworks: Compare your template against established frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF 2.0), ISO 27001:2022, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and CIS Controls. Identify any domains these frameworks address that your questionnaire does not.
• Tiering Alignment: Verify that your questionnaire depth is proportional to vendor criticality. Not every vendor needs all 86+ questions — ensure your tiering model (critical, high, medium, low) correctly maps to questionnaire scope.

External Validation

• Industry Standard Questionnaires: Consider supplementing your custom template with standardized instruments such as SIG (Shared Assessments Standardized Information Gathering), CSA CAIQ (Cloud Security Alliance Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire), or VSAQ (Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire). These provide industry-accepted baselines and improve vendor response rates since many vendors maintain pre-completed versions.
• Independent Reviews: Engage a third-party risk management consultant or advisory firm to review your template and assess its effectiveness, coverage, and alignment with current threat intelligence.
• Vendor Feedback: Pilot the VRA template with a representative sample of vendors and gather feedback on question clarity, relevance, response burden, and ambiguity. Vendors who find questionnaires confusing or irrelevant are more likely to provide low-quality responses.

Continuous Improvement

• Regular Update Cadence: Schedule quarterly reviews of your VRA template to incorporate emerging threats, new regulatory requirements, technology shifts (such as widespread AI adoption), and lessons learned from security incidents across your vendor portfolio.
• Lessons Learned Integration: Analyze data from completed VRAs, vendor security incidents, and near-misses to identify areas where the template failed to surface risks that later materialized. Feed these findings back into template refinement.
• Metrics and Reporting: Track key metrics derived from VRA findings — number of high-risk vendors, most common control gaps, average remediation timelines, assessment completion rates, and vendor response quality scores. These metrics demonstrate VRM program effectiveness to leadership and auditors while identifying systemic weaknesses in your vendor ecosystem.

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Continuous Monitoring vs. Point-in-Time Assessments

Traditional VRM programs rely heavily on annual questionnaires — a vendor completes a lengthy assessment once per year, the responses are reviewed, a risk score is assigned, and the vendor is not evaluated again until the next cycle. This approach was defensible a decade ago, but the modern threat landscape renders it dangerously insufficient.

Why Annual Questionnaires Fall Short

• Risk is dynamic. A vendor’s security posture can change dramatically between annual reviews. An acquisition, a major breach, a key security hire departing, or a new product launch can fundamentally alter their risk profile within weeks.
• Questionnaire responses decay. The answers a vendor provides in January may not reflect their reality in September. Infrastructure changes, policy updates, personnel turnover, and new compliance requirements are all ongoing.
• Attackers don’t wait for assessment cycles. The mean time to exploit newly disclosed vulnerabilities continues to shrink. A vendor compromised by a zero-day in March cannot wait until your December assessment to be flagged.
• Point-in-time snapshots create false confidence. A green risk score from six months ago provides no assurance about today’s state.

Implementing Continuous Vendor Monitoring

Continuous monitoring does not mean abandoning questionnaires — it means supplementing periodic deep assessments with ongoing signals that provide real-time visibility into vendor risk. A mature approach combines:

• External attack surface monitoring: Continuously scan vendor-facing infrastructure for exposed services, certificate issues, DNS misconfigurations, and publicly accessible sensitive data.
• Threat intelligence feeds: Monitor for vendor mentions in breach databases, dark web forums, ransomware gang communications, and vulnerability disclosures affecting their technology stack.
• Compliance status tracking: Monitor vendor certification renewals (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS) and flag lapses or scope changes.
• Financial and operational signals: Track vendor financial health indicators, leadership changes, M&A activity, and workforce reductions that may signal deteriorating security investment.
• Fourth-party risk awareness: Monitor the vendors your vendors rely on — a compromise at a critical subprocessor is effectively a compromise at your vendor.

Real-Time Risk Scoring

Move beyond static risk scores assigned at assessment time. Implement a composite scoring model that blends:

• Baseline score from the most recent questionnaire and evidence review
• Dynamic modifiers from continuous monitoring signals (positive or negative)
• Contextual weighting based on the vendor’s access to sensitive data, criticality to business operations, and regulatory implications
• Trend analysis that flags vendors whose risk trajectory is worsening over time, even if their absolute score remains within tolerance

Event-Driven Reassessment Triggers

Define specific events that automatically trigger a reassessment or escalation, regardless of where the vendor falls in the annual cycle:

• Vendor discloses a security breach or is named in a public breach report
• Vendor’s SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification lapses or changes scope
• Vendor undergoes a merger, acquisition, or significant leadership change
• New critical vulnerability is disclosed affecting the vendor’s core technology stack
• Vendor fails to meet contractual SLAs for incident notification or patch timelines
• Regulatory action is taken against the vendor in any jurisdiction
• A significant subprocessor change is announced by the vendor
• Your organization significantly changes the scope of data shared with or processed by the vendor

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Automated VRM Tooling Recommendations

As vendor portfolios grow — most mid-to-large enterprises manage hundreds to thousands of third-party relationships — manual spreadsheet-based VRM becomes unsustainable. Modern VRM tooling automates the operational burden while improving assessment quality and coverage.

Key Capabilities to Evaluate

When selecting VRM tooling, look for platforms that provide:

• Questionnaire automation: Templated distribution, vendor self-service portals, response tracking, automated reminders, and deadline enforcement reduce the administrative overhead of assessment cycles.
• Evidence collection and verification: Automated ingestion of SOC 2 reports, ISO certificates, penetration test summaries, and policy documents — with OCR, expiration tracking, and scope verification.
• Risk scoring engines: Configurable algorithms that calculate risk scores from questionnaire responses, external monitoring signals, and business context, providing consistent and defensible scoring across your vendor portfolio.
• Continuous monitoring integration: Built-in or API-integrated external attack surface monitoring, threat intelligence, and compliance tracking that feeds directly into vendor risk profiles.
• Workflow and remediation tracking: Structured workflows for flagging findings, assigning remediation owners, tracking vendor responses, and verifying control improvements before closing issues.
• Reporting and board-level dashboards: Executive-friendly views showing portfolio-level risk posture, trending metrics, concentration risk, and compliance status across frameworks.
• Integration with GRC platforms: API connectivity with your broader governance, risk, and compliance ecosystem to avoid duplicate data entry and ensure vendor risk informs enterprise risk decisions.

Implementation Principles

• Start with your vendor tier model. Invest automation in your critical and high-risk vendors first, where the consequences of a missed assessment or stale data are greatest.
• Automate the repetitive, humanize the judgment. Use tooling to handle distribution, reminders, evidence tracking, and signal aggregation. Reserve human judgment for risk acceptance decisions, relationship management, and nuanced control evaluation.
• Integrate, don’t isolate. VRM tooling that operates in a silo provides limited value. Ensure it connects to your procurement workflow (triggering assessments when new vendors are onboarded), your incident response process (triggering reassessments when vendor incidents occur), and your contract management system (surfacing security clauses and renewal dates).
• Measure program maturity over time. Track assessment cycle time, vendor response rates, mean time to remediate findings, and percentage of vendors under continuous monitoring. These metrics demonstrate program value and guide investment decisions.

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Conclusion

A vendor risk assessment questionnaire is foundational to any VRM program — but it is only as effective as the process that surrounds it. The questionnaire itself serves as a data collection instrument. The real value emerges from how you scope assessments to vendor criticality, how you validate and verify responses, how you track remediation, and how you maintain ongoing visibility into vendor risk between assessment cycles.

The six domains covered in this template — information security, physical security, web application security, infrastructure security, AI/ML security, and supply chain security — reflect the current threat landscape facing organizations in 2026. However, the threat landscape does not stand still, and neither should your VRM program.

Build your program on three pillars: thorough initial assessment, continuous monitoring, and systematic improvement. Use the questionnaire sections as building blocks — not every vendor requires every question. Tier appropriately, automate where possible, and invest human judgment where it matters most: in understanding whether a vendor’s controls actually reduce risk, or merely create the appearance of it.

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