Compliance Teams Catching Vendor Data Errors
Compliance professionals are experiencing a recurring issue of inconsistent data and reporting from vendors, specifically in identity verification and IT asset disposal. This necessitates frequent audits and creates friction in maintaining compliance standards. The lack of clear documentation and broken handoffs between teams further exacerbates the problem.
SOURCES (60)
“The split you're describing matches what I've seen. The thing that caught me off guard the first time was a question about offboarding timelines, where I could describe exactly what we do but had no record of anyone having decided it, so writing the answer…”
“That's a fair point, and honestly, the feedback here has made the distinction much clearer. The intention isn't to publicly expose a company's vulnerabilities, infrastructure gaps, or proprietary code. The audit would happen privately first, and the company would have the opportunity to review the findings and address any important issues. If both sides agree to create content afterward, it would focus on the improvements and lessons learned- potentially as an anonymized case study o”
“Third-party scripts was tricky cause we knew what vendors we were using, but not what their scripts were actually doing once they were running in browser.”
“the anonymized case study angle is smart, nobody wants their infra gaps turned into content before they've had a chance to patch them.”
“An ownership check had been missed meaning you could in theory delete other people's files. In reality very unlikely as files were internally referenced via a random hash, so you'd have to correctly guess that which would be technically impossible. But still a security flaw.”
“Follow up to 117 / 118. A $1 investigation now gets a diagnosis, a system generated rewrite, and a dry GENERIC PLAN compare — but EXPLAIN (ANALYZE) and the COUNT( ) / sample equivalence check can't run without bind values, so result equivalence stays Unverified and Generate report is blocked (findings only). Goal: a "Bind values" input on the Candidate panel; the backend substitutes $1..$n with the supplied literals (AST verified, re validated read only) for the AddCandidate compare + equivalenc”
“Off guard stuff, not like weak passwords or exposed API keys, but something you assume is fine until you investigate it. submitted by /u/No_Honeydew_2453 [link] [comments]”
“Everything needs clean data, schema, etc. But OP has a blocker. Claude can help overcome it. Especially if you are starting with a hypothesis (which you should be) and not an open ended analysis.”
“Claude is great for one-off analysis, but it still needs clean data, schema context, and validation. The appeal of a product analytics tool is having repeatable cohort and retention workflows instead of rebuilding them from scratch each time.”
“For teams managing applications from developer commit through cloud deployment, how are you handling the gap between many specialized scanners and actual risk prioritization? We have tools for code, dependencies, secrets, infrastructure, CI/CD, and cloud exposure, but correlating all of that with the application reachability, data sensitivity, and business importance is still manual. The result is plenty of findings but not enough confidence about what should be fixed first. Have you added a con”
“Good list. Worth adding that whoever you pick, ask how many SOC 2s they've done in your specific industry. A well-priced auditor who doesn't understand your stack still costs you time in back-and-forth.”
“Feels like the space needs to normalize ongoing monitoring (bug bounties, threat detection, maybe even insurance) as part of the cost of running a protocol, not a one time expense you check off before mainnet.”
“Audits just catch what was there when they looked at the code, not what someone adds later or finds a way around. Seen this with bridges getting drained through stuff outside the smart contract scope, like frontend attacks or messed up admin keys. The code was fine, the setup around it had holes big enough to drive a truck through.”
“Your IT team is describing a real risk, but that's more a question of architecture than a hard rule. Plenty of legal AI deployments have access to both firm data and external sources with controls in place. The real question is whether your organization is comfortable with the risk profile and safeguards.”
“I’ve been testing an advisory triage prototype and one thing that keeps coming up is how quickly applicability logic gets messy once the inventory data isn’t clean. Basic version comparisons have held up pretty well, but product naming variations and CPE mismatches are much easier to break. For example, FortiAuthenticator vs Forti Authenticator can be enough to create a false negative if product normalization isn’t handled properly. Curious how people are dealing with this in real DevSecOps/vuln”
“I work in Governance, Risk & Compliance and spend a lot of my time working with SOC 2, ISO 27001, audit readiness, risk management, and compliance programs. I’ve noticed compliance tends to become a priority for SaaS companies pretty quickly once larger customers start asking for SOC 2 reports, security questionnaires, or other security requirements. A few things worth knowing: • You don’t automatically need SOC 2 just because you’re a SaaS company. Customer requirements often drive the timi”
“"A payload change after approval invalidates it rather than quietly reusing it" is the sentence that tells me you know exactly what you are building. Most approval systems fail precisely there: the approval outlives the thing that was approved. Bound to intent, append-only, no self-approval: that is governance done properly, and honestly it is the part I would put at the top of the README. Certificates are the wedge; the audit trail is the moat.”
“renewing is the easy half. if post-reload verification fails, does the agent automatically restore the previous cert and reload again, or stop for an operator?”
“Thank you for this post! I actually had a wave of satisfaction pass over me when reading it - validation! So many problems that teams/businesses are trying to solve with tech put the cart before the horse, and ultimately become a sunk cost. I may save this post, as it sets out really clearly why we should always put the effort into RCA! 🙏”
“I've spent a while trying to solve a problem that initially looked like a reporting problem. It usually started with someone senior asking a simple-sounding question: "Can you show me what we actually have?" Getting that picture meant gathering information from different places, exporting things, working in Excel, and manually piecing it all together. Apps here. Flows there. SharePoint somewhere else. Permissions somewhere else. What's licensed and what's actually being use”
“We're a 20-person B2B company and security questionnaires are a real bottleneck. They all land on our head of security, who's already stretched thin. We've answered many of these before but have no proper repository, so we reinvent the wheel every time. Is AI for SQs actually viable for lean teams without dedicated proposal staff? And how do you handle accuracy, since wrong answers are a liability? submitted by /u/AeroLMS [link] [comments]”
“Ex auditor. Auditors are strongly encouraged to mix up some of the testing at least so the audit isn't totally predictable which would aid in covering up fraud. Audit sampling generally needs to be at a transaction level. Your report at a consolidated level would be insufficient unless you're able to provide support for every single one of those transactions making up a sampled group subtotal which you probably don't want to do and would waste everyone's time. I'm not sure th”
“The check page is the part I'd want to stress-test, because DOB records and tax lot mapping are notoriously inconsistent. One building I know of kept getting dinged for a lot it didn't even own anymore after a condo conversion, and the city's system took months to reflect the updated BBL split. If your tool pulls from a static export or an API that lags, you'll show violations people already resolved or miss ones that just posted. The pricing seems fair, $149 to make a headache g”
“gamebrigada's read on Forcepoint matches mine, its conventional metadata DLP and the classification engine is basically the same shape as everyone else's. What nobody has flagged yet is that you're treating Copilot and ChatGPT as one problem when they're really two. Copilot isn't leaking data out of your tenant, it's surfacing stuff the user already had permission to open and never managed to find, so that's a SharePoint permissions and sensitivity label cleanup job.”
“Sure, but as long as they contractually say they will do it the liability is on them in US law. So if a customer says there data leaked, it’s on the lab not the company using them.”
“The biggest real challenge? Knowing what actually matters versus what's just noise. Most tools are too complex and expensive for a 10 person team.”
“While moving my DCs from an old cluster to a new one following vendor's instructions, I discovered too late they didn't account for DCs requiring extra steps due to being DCs, and i didn't know better. Both ended up in rollback state. Went to pull backups and discovered the backup appliance was not only offline, but had been removed from the rack! Following Microsoft's instructions, tried upgrading in place to new version of Server as it was supposed to fix the rollback state, bu”
“I agree with this one. The expert will give you a price, the price can give you leverage to implement more systems that help you/the IT department. Utilizing the expert will make this executive less likely to think youre shitty at your job should you fail to recover the data. This executive may also help back you in spending more to achieve better things in the IT department.”
“Keep in mind there are different requirement obligations based on how big/commercial you are. So your initial level of compliance, should you service that locale, really isn't that burdensome tbh.”
“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.”
“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.”
“Vendor Management program, we employ a tiered system for products and vendors based on criticality and utilization. Tier 1 is reassessed each year and we send assessments to those companies, same as Tier 2, but we do 2 years, etc. Through tier 5. When we intially sign contracts, its based upon those answers and we redline the shit out of those contracts. Ultimately, most places wont agree to right to audit and honestly that is a massive undertaking so places just dont do it. You assume your cont”
“I’ve seen this go wrong when the representation lives in people’s heads or in a Slack thread. The useful pattern is to tie each legal statement to a named technical owner and evidence, even if the evidence is boring. For a deletion claim, the record would include something like: - claim: user data deleted within X days - systems in scope - systems explicitly out of scope or handled differently (backups, logs, analytics, vendors, model training, archives) - owner who confirmed it - evidence revie”
“for either SOC 2 or ISO 27001 you need documented, ongoing security awareness training with measurable outcomes. annual slideshows don't satisfy auditors anymore. riot gives you exactly what auditors want: regular phishing simulations with tracked results, evidence of improvement over time, documentation that repeat offenders receive additional training, and exportable compliance reports. our SOC 2 audit went smoothly because riot had all the evidence ready”
“A provider's first move is never "how do I improve." It is "your data about us is wrong." We have no path for that, free or paid. The gap claim and improve is Pro and assumes the record is correct. improve my score is free and assumes the same. get provider evidence — the tool whose entire purpose is "the basis for a claim should never sit behind the claim" — returns a provenance summary and a legend, no evidence ( 75). So a provider who believes we have them wrong has exactly three options: ema”
“That depends more on who manages the guide after rollout ? I believe there should always be someone overlooking them to manage such fallbacks whenever there's an update”
“We don't perform any user detail resolution. The audit log component just renders out what we have stored, which links user IDs to actions and timestamps. If clients want to show joined data, it is not recommended to use our audit log component, but instead just query our audit API directly and then transform the returned logs with resolved user data in the client backend.”
“Late to this, but auditors aren't looking for a shiny interface. They want an immutable paper trail that actually proves your controls work. We see firms cut their manual review hours by 40 percent in the first year by centralizing disparate data. You still need someone to handle the edge cases that don't fit your automated logic. If you're still relying on spreadsheets, you'll spend more time explaining your process to the auditor than actually managing the risk.”
“What's the point of having managers review if they're not actually reviewing anything?”
“What's the role of the AP person, if not to ensure we aren't paying duplicate invoices?”
“Keeps me up too, we punted on perfectly trusting the endpoint and gated on data instead, contractors only touch the billing app which has nothing sensitive in it and anyone who needs the crown jewels gets a shipped laptop. Not elegant but it took the scary version down to about 5 people.”
I think "Chartered Accountant" from the context, but I'm not sure.
“Notion doesn't have their own models. They use Anthropic, OpenAI and others as vendors. There are security measures in place such as SOC and ISO standards to ensure the likelihood of a data leakage is near impossible. And if you are on the enterprise plan you can get 0 retention AI. But at the end of the day it's your call. Peace of mind is what matters 🙂”
“We need someone to explain to regulators why ZK is superior tech for this kind of stuff. They still don't know it exists”
“Same experience. The fix for us was treating the spec as the gate: if the agent can't point to the line in the doc that justifies the state transition, it doesn't ship. Catches the "correct code, wrong transition" class earlier than any sandbox run.”
“The reconciliation job is the real catch-all, that's smart. Sandbox scripts for known failure modes, reconciliation owns everything that slips through. What's your alert threshold for the silence case, do you tune it per event type or one global N?”
“The scene I keep running into: a 15-person B2B SaaS finally gets a shot at a mid-market deal. Procurement sends back an Excel with 300 security questions. The one technical person who actually understands the questions loses three days to it. Next deal, new spreadsheet, same questions worded differently. The tools built for this start around $10k a year and you need a sales call just to see a price. If you get two questionnaires a quarter, that math never works. So I built SolveRFP. Three things”
“At the industry leaders level (not necessarily a company, ie Linus), that’s absolutely not true. A few push to figure it out and fix the industry standard, but that takes time. Otherwise we would still be on simple passwords. This is always a cat and mouse game. Good security is just the mouse trying to outrun the cat (vulnerabilities) ultimately. But eventually people won’t use your service if, not your service but, they, are held responsible, for something they didn’t do. Fraudulent CC is the”
“Well, you have a good point and this has been raised to the upper management before. We must be able to produce evidences that we are providing secure and limited access to the data, including data usage and privacy in everyone’s contract. Obviously locking every possible way to “extract” is impossible, but I think at least legally we cover the other half that we cannot control, like someone taking photos from the screen. I’m by any means a specialist in the topic and the reason I came on a publ”
“Well, if you purchase E&O cybersecurity insurance they stipulate you have to follow it in order to get insured. You just have to do it. They won’t cover anything if it’s not and if they find holes in your controls they’ll limit what they pay out or if they have to hire a 3rd party to clean up after an incident they’ll ding you for it.”
“The one worth watching for is not re-testing a completed flow after time passes. QA usually opens a report right after it's generated, while the source data is still fresh, so everything lines up. The mismatch would show up days later when someone reopens the same object, and page level tests won't catch it if they always spin up fresh fixtures instead of aged ones. Do your test fixtures ever get aged like that, or are they always freshly generated?”
“The denominator is a lie at every company over 50 people. The IdP only knows about apps you’ve paid the "SAML tax" for, and finance's expense/CC list is always 6 months late... We don't really trust the IdP number anymore, we've been tracking auth at the browser layer (use Unixi for this). Once you actually monitor logins where people interact with the web, you realize your "91% coverage" is usually closer to 40%. It’s depressing, but at least the denominator is r”
“Our MSP has recently implemented CIPP for 365 administration with the goal of removing the need for techs to ever have access to Global Admin accounts, and for a strong audit trail. It's mostly been working great and I really like CIPP. But yesterday one of our techs was trying to view and potentially edit individual folder-level permissions on a folder deeper within a client's sharepoint site. We were unable to find a way to do this, and after some research, it seems this is an intentio”
“Hi everyone, if there are any controllers in here who have gone through software evaluations recently, which features proved most valuable after implementation? Im trying to make sure Im prioritizing functionality in demos and not falling for sales and marketing tactics. submitted by /u/Aggressive-Tart07 [link] [comments]”
“[Perplexity] ★ 1/5 (v26.32.0) — I was charged for Computer-related processes that, based on the company’s internal audit, were never performed. The AI actually admitted to charge but never performing the task. Despite repeated support requests, I have not received a clear resolution or refund outcome. The experience has been frustrating because support repeatedly focuses on verification rather than directly addressing the charges and the audit findings. There support is non existent.”
“Storing the comparison logic version alongside the two scan IDs is the part I wouldn't have thought of and it's the one that actually makes the mess repairable. Right now if I wanted to know which comparisons were species-matched versus identity-matched, I'd be inferring it from dates and hoping I remembered when v28 went out. A version field turns that from archaeology into a query. The upload-confirmation point is the same argument I keep losing to myself. I fall back to the local”
“Good catch, I'd collapsed two different users into one blank screen. The old rows are identifiable, so the branch is cheap, and the messages are genuinely different, one person needs a second scan and the other needs to name the pet they've already scanned 68 times. Telling both of them nothing is the worst version of it.”
“keep finding accounts nobody in IT provisioned, created directly in saas tools by teams that never looped us in. some of these have been active for years with access to data we didn't know was exposed outside our normal controls. manual discovery across every saas app isn't realistic given how many we have now, and it never catches the ones nobody remembers exist in the first place. what's actually worked for surfacing this without needing a custom integration for every single app in”