Customer trust and security are an increasingly complex dichotomy — technology buyers demand more information than ever, as cybersecurity becomes more closely aligned with business success and failure.
As cybersecurity threats continue to multiply, a growing number of organizations are investing in increased visibility by developing a public profile for security documentation and communications. These profiles, or Trust Centers, house all pertinent security information for the company’s buyers and customers to access as they complete their due diligence as part of the buyer security review process.
But what exactly makes up a Trust Center, and why is it a must-have for transparency and customer trust in a 2024 environment?
This article covers:
- What is a Trust Center?
- How to build a Trust Center
- Trust Centers and security questionnaires
- Benefits of a Trust Center
- How to use a Trust Center
What is a Trust Center?
A Trust Center is a customer-facing home for your company’s security posture, balancing the need for transparency and maintaining control of sensitive information.
The core objective of a Trust Center is to improve the outdated buyer security review process, or third party risk assessment, a historically labor- and time-intensive prerequisite to signing or renewing a contract. A Trust Center aims to reduce the friction inherent in this process by aggregating all security posture information into one place, so buyers and customers can conduct their security reviews in a self-serve way. Meanwhile, a Trust Center provides sellers with customizable permission controls, increasing visibility and oversight over their documentation and artifacts.
These capabilities have the effect of eliminating extensive communications and reducing the need to resort to a security questionnaire to demonstrate the company’s security posture. Through Trust Centers, buyers and sellers experience a far less cumbersome security review process, as workflows become streamlined and — even better — automated.
A Trust Center has two “sides,” one side for buyers and customers to find and ingest pertinent information and one for sellers to manage that information and analyze its impact. The customer-facing and back end of Trust Centers each have unique goals.
Customer-facing side of Trust Centers
Customers use Trust Centers to integrate all the steps of the security review into one location, replacing manual processes and making it simpler to assess a vendor’s security posture.
1. Visible and shareable: A Trust Center provides an easy-to-navigate, public-facing security portal for documentation and communication. Trust Centers make security information shareable to members of the buying organization, with granted permissions based on customizable rules.
2. Automated: A Trust Center automates the flow of NDAs, access approvals, and other workflows to reduce friction in the security review process.
3. Simplifies the buying process: Whether reducing/eliminating security questionnaires, consolidating information, or building customer trust through transparency, a Trust Center simplifies the buying journey for customers.
Back end of Trust Centers
Sellers use Trust Centers to reduce the manual intensiveness and repeated processes in the security review process, plus accelerate the flow of securely-delivered information to buyers and customers.
1. Single source of truth: A Trust Center allows sellers to maintain a single, up-to-date repository of all security documentation and information, including compliance badges, policies, and answers to all common buyer questions.
2. Oversight for security teams: A Trust Center becomes a nerve center for security teams, improving control and oversight on the who, what, and how long for documentation. Customized access controls manage visibility and keep documents in the right hands.
3. Connection with critical platforms: Through connections and integrations with platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot, a Trust Center expedites the flow of information among sales teams, security teams, and buyers. Trust Center integrations automate action tracking, reducing internal team lift, turnaround times, and the risk of information dissonance.
How to build a Trust Center
Building a Trust Center comes down to one goal: streamlining every step in the security review process. Without a Trust Center, security reviews are ad hoc, reactive, and ripe for missteps and miscommunication.
For your buyers and customers, this means reducing the steps to accessing information they need to complete their assessment, including streamlining the NDA signing and access request processes into one location.
Transparency only works if security and GRC teams can effectively control their security documentation and information on the back end. Loss of information control can mean a loss of integrity and customer trust, so the need for transparency must be met with rigorous, yet frictionless systems for success, i.e. Trust Centers.
For security and GRC teams, this means minimizing the platforms needed to house various types of security documentation, building automations around permissioning, and providing visibility for cross-functional partners, like sales team members. When buyer review processes such as NDA signing, access controls, and continuous oversight are made foolproof, it decreases opportunities to break the flow of information for buyers, customers, and internal stakeholders.
Building a Trust Center means creating a holistic view of your security program. These are the six most common elements of Trust Centers:
Overview
A customizable statement that provides a synopsis of the company’s philosophy on security and trust, as well as pertinent contacts for security and GRC teams.
Compliance certifications
Including, but not limited to: AWS, CCPA, CSA STAR, EU-US DPF, FERPA, GDPR, GLBA, HIPAA, ISO, PCI, PIPEDA, SOC, and VPAT.
Security documentation, both public and private
For example, penetration testing reports, security/privacy whitepapers, compliance certification PDFs, and network diagrams.
Knowledge base of answers to common buyer questions
A wiki to house answers to common questions from buyers that can be made either public or private to internal teams.
Public updates log
An ongoing list of cybersecurity updates and communication relevant to customers, including responses to incidents and breaches or updated documentation.
Security review checklist items
Including, but not limited to: Details about product security features, data governance, access control, privacy and data protection, legal, terms, reports, infrastructure, network security, application security, corporate and endpoint security, self-assessment questionnaires, policies, and more.
Trust Centers and security questionnaires
Prior to the implementation of a Trust Center, most organizations will face a backlog of security questionnaires from buyers conducting their third party risk assessments. Security questionnaires place a heavy time burden on security and sales teams, leading to inefficiencies through repetitive information requests and prolonged back-and-forth communication.
A well-built Trust Center can dramatically reduce the need for organizations to respond to a security questionnaire. With a Trust Center, sellers can be proactive in sharing their security documentation and information. This allows buyers to self serve the information they need to complete a security review on their own time.
While the chances of a security questionnaire are greatly reduced with a Trust Center, they may still occur. When they do, a Trust Center can help generate automated responses leveraging all of the information housed in the Trust Center and knowledge base. Advanced Trust Centers will allow you to respond to questionnaires directly in your buyers’ TPRM portals, leveraging your information repositories to answer questions in seconds.
Benefits of a Trust Center
The benefits of a Trust Center are closely connected to the outcomes that drive customer trust:
Simplification
Establish one source of truth for all of your company’s security documentation, artifacts, and policies. Simplification eliminates up to 95% of time security teams typically spend on questionnaires while reducing friction in the buyer journey.
Automation
Enable self-service by using a Trust Center as your security portal — automate security reviews and downloading of documentation via set permissions, while reducing the total interaction time needed from your security/sales teams.
Consolidation
Maintain a collection for all your buyers’ need-to-know security answers. Trust Centers enable robust search capabilities, reducing the steps needed to find specific information (both internally and externally) and the labor demand for your security and GRC teams.
Integration
A Trust Center can systemize buyer access, incorporating the security review process into your sales team’s workflow with integrations like Salesforce and HubSpot. Access requests are automated through customizable rules built into the Trust Center’s CRM integrations.
Analyzation
Measure the impact of your efforts with a dashboard built into the Trust Center’s backend, reporting on key metrics for real-time analysis.
Connection
Use a Trust Center to maintain simple, clear communications about security with buyers and customers. Messages come straight from your security team, cultivating customer trust.
How to use a Trust Center
A Trust Center is a powerful resource for your teams and for your buyers seeking to understand your security posture. With the information and resources provided by a Trust Center, you can protect sensitive data while simultaneously increasing information visibility, building long-term customer trust.
With the incorporation of a Trust Center, however, comes several strategic shifts. How you deliver your Trust Center strategy to your leadership team and internal stakeholders can be the difference between a successful rollout and a disruptive change.
Enabling sales teams
While security teams are integral to the building and implementation of a Trust Center, sales teams are typically the first touchpoint with the customer. Ensuring your sales teams understand workflows and best practices around the Trust Center requires adequate enablement and training.
This training can include:
- Objectives of the new process
- Launch preparation, including announcement templates
- Customer-facing communications, including FAQs
- Quick start guides for sales teams
- Maintaining engagement with the Trust Center
At SafeBase, we have a holistic Trust Center launch portal dedicated to enabling sales teams and the rest of your cross-functional stakeholders. The world’s leading cybersecurity professionals at companies like Asana, LinkedIn, and Hubspot trust SafeBase to position security as a competitive advantage through Trust Centers.
SafeBase is the scalable Trust Center that automates the security review process between buyers and sellers. With a SafeBase Trust Center, companies can seamlessly share sensitive security documentation with buyers and customers, including streamlining the NDA signing process by integrating with your CRM and your data warehouse.
If you’re ready to take back the time your team spends on security questionnaires, create a better buying experience, and position security as the revenue-driver it is, get in touch with us.
