There’s a friction we keep seeing in large organisations. The innovation team wants to move fast, pilot new tools, work with new vendors, startups, SaaS platforms, whatever helps them stay ahead. The security team needs to run due diligence on every single one of them. So out goes the vendor questionnaire, usually a sprawling Excel sheet that takes days to fill in properly. Then someone has to review the answers, chase the missing documents, crossreference everything against policy.
By the time that’s done, innovation has three more vendors in the queue.
Security can’t keep up. Not because they don’t care, not because they’re obstructionist, but because the process is manual and they have a lot of other things on their plate. So the queue backs up. Timelines slip. Innovation gets frustrated. Security gets blamed.
And then companies try to solve it by hiring more security people, or running team alignment sessions, or telling everyone to “collaborate better.”
Nobody questions the Excel sheet.
The real problem isn’t people. It’s a process
The security professionals we work with are good at their jobs. They know how to assess risk. They know what questions matter. What they don’t need to be doing is spending the bulk of their time on repetitive admin: reviewing the same fields, chasing the same documents, running the same manual checks for every new vendor that comes through.
That’s not a people problem. That’s a process problem wearing a people problem’s clothes.
The friction between innovation and security teams isn’t about culture. It’s not about alignment. It’s about a manual vendor assessment process that simply doesn’t scale. When security is buried in admin, they can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. So the queue grows, frustration builds, and everyone ends up working against each other instead of alongside each other.
What fixing it actually looks like
Automate the repetitive part, and everything changes.
Due diligence that used to take weeks comes down to hours. The backlog clears. And when the innovation team doubles the number of vendors they want to work with next year, security actually has the capacity to keep up, because the routine work is no longer eating into their whole day.
Security gets time back to do what they’re actually there to do: make smart risk decisions, advise on how to integrate third-party services safely, and help the business move forward without cutting corners.
No extra headcount. Just the right tools.
That’s the problem 3rdComply was built to solve. Security and innovation are pulling in the same direction, without one constantly waiting on the other.
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