Most guidance on supplier risk management was written for enterprises with procurement teams, dedicated vendor risk managers, and budgets for comprehensive due diligence. It assumes resources most SMEs don’t have.
This creates a problem: when the recommended approach is unachievable, organisations do nothing. Supplier risk becomes something you know you should address but can’t figure out how to approach proportionately.
The gap between “enterprise-grade vendor risk management” and “hoping our suppliers are trustworthy” is where most SMEs live.
But there’s a middle ground that works: good-enough supplier assurance that’s proportionate, sustainable, and genuinely useful.
What good-enough actually means
Good-enough supplier assurance is not about perfection. It’s about reasonable confidence maintained over time.
You don’t need complete visibility into every supplier’s security practices. You need to know:
- Who your critical suppliers are
- What risks they introduce
- Whether they’re maintaining appropriate security standards
- When something significant changes
That’s achievable without enterprise tooling, dedicated teams, or bureaucratic processes. But it requires structure rather than informal institutional knowledge.
Starting with what matters: the supplier register
Good supplier assurance begins with knowing who you’re working with.
Most SMEs can’t produce an accurate, complete list of their suppliers on demand. Different teams sign up for different tools. Someone’s credit card has subscriptions no one else knows about. That “approved suppliers” list from two years ago is wildly outdated.
The first step: build and maintain a supplier register. Not a complex database—a simple, maintained record of:
- Supplier name and service provided
- What data they access or process
- Whether they’re business-critical
- Primary contact
- Contract expiry and renewal dates
- Assurance status (certificates, last review)
This doesn’t require specialised software. A well-structured spreadsheet works initially. What matters is someone owns keeping it current, and there’s a process for adding suppliers as they’re onboarded.
Without an accurate supplier register, you can’t do proportionate risk management. You don’t know what you’re managing.
Risk categorisation: not all suppliers matter equally
The second principle: risk-based prioritisation.
Your payment processor handling customer card data is not the same risk as your office supplies vendor. Your cloud hosting provider is not equivalent to your project management tool.
Effective supplier assurance categorises suppliers by risk, typically three or four tiers:
Critical suppliers: Handle sensitive data, provide business-critical services, or have significant system access. These require ongoing, active assurance. Examples: payment processors, cloud infrastructure, systems handling customer data.
Important suppliers: Provide significant services but with lower inherent risk or less critical data access. These need periodic review but not continuous monitoring. Examples: CRM platforms, internal collaboration tools, HR systems.
Standard suppliers: Low-risk services with minimal data access. Basic verification during onboarding is sufficient. Examples: office supplies, non-critical SaaS tools, marketing services.
This categorisation drives where you focus effort. Critical suppliers get most attention. Standard suppliers get minimal oversight. This is not negligence—it’s proportionate risk management.
What assurance looks like for each tier
Different risk tiers warrant different levels of assurance:
For critical suppliers
- Verify appropriate security certification (ISO 27001, SOC 2, or equivalent)
- Collect and review security documentation during onboarding
- Monitor for security incidents or significant changes
- Conduct periodic reviews (at minimum annually)
- Ensure contracts include security obligations and incident notification requirements
- Maintain current evidence of their security posture
For important suppliers
- Verify basic security credentials (Cyber Essentials or similar)
- Review security practices during onboarding
- Check certification status remains current
- Conduct periodic reviews (every 18-24 months)
- Basic contractual security terms
For standard suppliers
- Confirm basic legitimacy and reputation
- Quick security check during onboarding
- Rely on standard contractual terms
- Minimal ongoing oversight unless something raises concerns
The key principle: match assurance effort to actual risk. Applying the same process to every supplier is neither sustainable nor useful.
Moving beyond point-in-time checks
Where many SMEs fail: treating supplier assurance as one-time onboarding.
You verify the ISO 27001 certificate, review their security questionnaire, sign the contract. Box ticked. Then nothing happens for three years until contract renewal.
But supplier risk doesn’t freeze after onboarding. Security posture changes. Incidents happen. Certifications expire. Personnel changes affect capability. Infrastructure evolves.
Good-enough supplier assurance recognises this by implementing some form of ongoing monitoring, even if lightweight:
Automated certificate tracking: Set reminders for when supplier certifications expire. Basic, but surprisingly uncommon. When a critical supplier’s ISO 27001 certificate expires, you should know immediately, not discover it during an audit eighteen months later.
Security incident monitoring: Stay informed about security incidents affecting your suppliers. This doesn’t require sophisticated threat intelligence—basic news monitoring and supplier transparency work. Many breaches become public. You just need to be paying attention.
Annual supplier reviews: For critical suppliers, conduct light annual reviews. This doesn’t mean re-running entire onboarding. It means checking: Is certification current? Have there been incidents? Has service scope changed? Do we need updated evidence?
Contract renewal assessments: When contracts renew, reassess the supplier’s security posture, not just commercial terms.
None of this requires dedicated systems, though supplier assurance platforms can automate much of it and reduce manual effort significantly as you scale.
Evidence that actually matters
Effective supplier assurance focuses on evidence providing real insight, not documentation for documentation’s sake.
Current certification: For critical suppliers, valid ISO 27001, SOC 2, or equivalent certification. Actually check dates and scope—certificates that expired six months ago or don’t cover relevant services aren’t useful.
Incident history and response: How has the supplier responded to past security incidents (theirs or industry-wide)? Transparency and competent response matter more than perfection.
Security practices documentation: For critical suppliers, understand their approach to encryption, access controls, data backup, incident response. This doesn’t mean reviewing fifty-page technical documents—it means understanding at a level sufficient to assess maturity.
Contractual commitments: Clear security obligations, incident notification requirements, audit rights in contracts. These don’t prevent problems but establish expectations and remedies.
The common thread: focus on evidence providing meaningful signals about supplier security capability and commitment, not box-ticking that generates paperwork without insight.
Making it sustainable without a procurement team
SMEs don’t have dedicated vendor risk managers. Supplier assurance has to work without requiring someone’s full-time attention.
This means building processes that are:
Embedded in existing workflows: Add supplier assurance steps to onboarding processes that already exist. When someone wants to sign up for new software, there’s a step confirming it’s been added to the supplier register and appropriate checks completed. This doesn’t create new process—it enhances existing approval workflows.
Automated where possible: Use tools that reduce manual effort. Automated certificate monitoring, security news alerts, contract renewal reminders. Much of supplier assurance can be automated or systematised to reduce cognitive load.
Appropriate to risk: Spending two hours reviewing a critical supplier’s security practices is reasonable. Spending two hours on every supplier regardless of risk is unsustainable. Risk-based effort makes this workable.
Reviewed periodically, not constantly: You don’t need to think about supplier risk daily. You need scheduled moments (quarterly reviews, contract renewals, annual planning) where supplier risk is explicitly considered. The rest of the time, it runs on automated monitoring with alerts for significant changes.
When to invest in better tooling
Small organisations can manage good-enough supplier assurance with spreadsheets and manual processes. But there’s a point where this stops scaling.
Signs you’ve reached that point:
- Supplier count has grown beyond what manual tracking can manage (usually 20-40 suppliers depending on team size)
- People are signing up for new suppliers without any assessment because the process is too burdensome
- You can’t quickly answer questions about supplier risk from auditors, board members, or customers
- Certificate expirations and contract renewals are being missed
- No one has visibility into the complete supplier landscape
At this point, investment in dedicated supplier assurance tools makes sense. Not because manual processes are impossible, but because they’ve become the bottleneck preventing proportionate oversight.
Modern supplier assurance platforms automate monitoring, track evidence, alert on changes, and provide visibility without requiring enterprise budgets or implementations.
What success looks like
You’ll know your supplier assurance approach is working when:
You can confidently answer questions about supplier risk from your board, auditors, or customers. Not with perfect information, but with reasonable, evidence-based confidence about your critical suppliers.
New suppliers are assessed proportionately before onboarding. Not with enterprise-scale due diligence, but with appropriate checks based on the risk they introduce.
You’re alerted to significant changes in supplier security posture. Not everything, but the things that matter: expired certifications, security incidents, material changes to critical suppliers.
The process doesn’t feel bureaucratic or overwhelming. It’s embedded in how you work, not an additional layer of administration everyone resents.
Supplier assurance supports business decisions rather than blocking them. When evaluation reveals concerning gaps, there’s conversation about risk and mitigation rather than automatic rejection.
Addressing the accountability gap
Why good-enough supplier assurance matters beyond risk reduction: accountability.
When you use suppliers, you inherit their risk. But you remain accountable for outcomes. Your customers, regulators, insurers—they expect you to have exercised appropriate oversight of third parties you depend on.
“We trusted our supplier” is not a defence when things go wrong. But “we conducted proportionate due diligence, maintained current evidence of their security posture, and monitored for significant changes” demonstrates reasonable care.
Good-enough supplier assurance gives you something to point to. Not perfect documentation of perfect processes, but evidence you took inherited supplier risk seriously and managed it proportionately given your size and resources.
This matters increasingly as regulators, insurers, and customers expect basic supplier oversight as standard practice, not optional sophistication.
The reasonable minimum
Good-enough supplier assurance for SMEs is not about implementing enterprise processes on smaller budgets. It’s about meeting a reasonable standard: proportionate oversight of inherited risk, maintained over time, appropriate to your size and constraints.
That standard includes:
- Knowing who your suppliers are
- Understanding which ones matter most
- Verifying appropriate security practices before onboarding
- Maintaining visibility into ongoing security posture
- Having evidence demonstrating reasonable care
This is achievable. It doesn’t require dedicated teams or expensive tooling. It does require accepting that supplier assurance is part of doing business responsibly, not optional sophistication.
When you inherit supplier risk, you inherit it whether you have enterprise resources or not. The question is not whether you can afford supplier assurance.
The question is whether you can afford to ignore it.
