A large enterprise software company had built its vendor risk management program on a platform the team had quietly outgrown. Reviews were manual, reporting was weak, and the gap between what leadership needed to see and what the system could produce was widening. When the security trust team began evaluating alternatives, they arrived with a detailed requirements list and a clear mandate: find a platform that could automate the review workflow, surface AI-assisted insights, and give leadership a cleaner picture of third-party risk. Drata matched that list and closed the gap the incumbent had left open.
[ The Problem ]
Manual vendor reviews, weak executive reporting, and a platform that couldn't keep up.
The incumbent vendor risk platform had enough capability to stay in place, but not enough automation or usability to keep pace with a maturing GRC program. Vendor assessments required more manual effort than the team could sustain: disjointed questionnaires, fragmented follow-up work, and no meaningful AI assistance to reduce review time.
The reporting problem was equally pressing. Leadership needed clear KPI and risk visibility, and the existing system could not deliver it in a format that was useful at the executive level. Without a credible reporting layer, the team had no way to communicate risk posture upward. Staying on the incumbent path meant accepting both problems indefinitely.
[ What they needed ]
The security trust team needed a platform that could do all of the following:
- Automate vendor onboarding questionnaires and reduce manual review effort
- Support multi-reviewer workflows with role-based access controls
- Generate AI-assisted SOC 2 and questionnaire summaries for faster assessments
- Provide an integrated risk register with dashboard-style reporting
- Deliver customizable questionnaire logic and dynamic follow-up capability
- Produce executive-ready KPI and risk visibility without manual formatting
- Connect to existing identity and workflow tooling without expanding implementation scope
[ Why Drata won ]
Selected over Onspring, which could not match Drata's workflow automation, AI-assisted review capability, or executive reporting model.
Workflow automation replaced manual effort directly: Drata mapped to every item on the security trust team's pre-stated requirements list, including AI summaries, dynamic questionnaire logic, and multi-reviewer workflows. Onspring had none of those capabilities at the level the team needed.
Executive reporting was a concrete deliverable, not a feature claim: the team confirmed during evaluation that Drata's dashboard and reporting format was exactly what leadership needed. That was a gap the incumbent had never closed.
Existing trust lowered the evaluation barrier: a prior relationship with the Trust Center product gave the security team confidence that adopting Drata was a low-risk next step, not a cold displacement from an unknown vendor.
Phased commercial structure matched the buying reality: packaging was aligned to the immediate VRM use case rather than forcing a larger platform purchase upfront, which kept the deal tied to an urgent operational need and made the business case straightforward to approve internally.
[ How Drata solved it ]
Drata's TPRM addressed the core workflow problem directly: vendor onboarding questionnaires, multi-reviewer assignment, role-based review access, and recurring review scheduling replaced the manual, disjointed process the team had been running on the incumbent platform. The operational lift dropped immediately.
Drata's AI-assisted SOC 2 and questionnaire summaries gave the security trust team a faster path through third-party reviews, reducing the time spent reading and synthesizing vendor documentation. That capability had been absent from the incumbent entirely.
Drata's GRC reporting dashboards solved the executive visibility problem. The charts and tables mapped directly to what the team needed to show leadership, replacing a reporting model that had required manual assembly. The integrated risk register gave the team a single place to track and communicate vendor risk posture.
Implementation scope was kept deliberately narrow in the first phase, with identity management through Okta and workflow integration with existing tooling, while infrastructure and HRIS connections were deferred. That kept the initial deployment focused on the urgent VRM use case and reduced the risk of scope creep slowing time to value.
[ Before and after Drata ]
Before Drata, vendor risk reviews consumed direct team time with no automation, no AI assistance, and no reporting layer that leadership could act on. After, the team operates a structured, AI-assisted workflow with executive-ready dashboards and a platform built to expand as the GRC program grows.
[ Business outcome ]
The security trust team replaced a manual, incumbent-dependent review process with an automated workflow that scales with the program rather than against it. Vendor assessments that previously required significant manual coordination now move through structured, AI-assisted workflows with role-based access and dynamic follow-up logic built in.
Leadership reporting shifted from a manual assembly problem to a dashboard the team can surface on demand. Executive visibility into third-party risk is now a repeatable output, not a periodic project. The platform is also positioned to expand into broader compliance automation as the GRC program matures, giving the team a foundation that the incumbent could not have provided.