Vanta

Avantages

Policy creation and management. Toons of integration and automated tests. Very cool integrated vulnerability management.

Inconvénients

Risk management can be more flexible. We started the new approach to risk assessment and can’t use internal risk management instrument so we made it in excel :-)

Avantages

Vanta enabled us to move our compliance (SOC 2, and next PCI) projects forward in an organized and monitored manner. After struggling manually with SOC 2 requirements with a major accounting firm, we got to audit readiness in half a year and felt confident going into our audit.

Inconvénients

There is definitely a learning curve, and I am sure the system has useful features that I have not encountered yet. That is not really a negative, though.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Vanta

Avantages

Without Vanta we would definitely not have been able to achieve SOC2 compliance throughout our business and then have visibility of maintaining that status. The dashboard and easy progress bar indicating where work is still needed guides you through everything you need to know and achieve.

Inconvénients

They require you to install an agent of every computer, which makes sense to be able to monitor certain things but this can become a pain in a remote business with lots of employees.

Avantages

The software seemed easy to use - at first, until some of my documents disappeared without explanation.

Inconvénients

They lost documents, and weren't able to explain to me satisfactorily where they went. This caused me to question renewal. I notified them I wouldn't renew without a good explanation, which I never got. Also, they make very difficult to reach them when you have a problem. At the time of this writing, no phone numbers in any email signatures, not on the web site either. You're forced into their process, and if they choose not to answer you via their web form, good luck. It's a black box at that point.

Avantages

The automation that Vanta offers, does get you really far on your path to become a certified company. The policy builder is one of the best features of the service. There is a wide variety of different frameworks to choose from.

Inconvénients

The start can be a bit overwhelming because there is a lot to do but you will get forward quite fast.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Vanta

Avantages

We love that Vanta has made it easy for us to develop a comprehensive InfoSec program and helped us prepare for our SOC2 audit. Onboarding was straightforward and the continuous monitoring ensures ongoing compliance. The product integrates with most of the software we use day-to-day and has saved a lot of time.

Inconvénients

There are some areas of the UI which are a bit rough around the edges and non-intuitive, I chalk this up to Vanta being a relatively new product. It has improved a lot since we became a customer and specific areas such as the employees onboarding/off-boarding flows show that the team is constantly iterating and responsive to user feedback.

In addition, I would love to see more automation in the product - we are a smaller company without a dedicated IT team. Vanta does a great job of alerting us to issues, but being able to help us take steps to remediate would be much appreciated.

Avantages

Vanta is great at providing clients with a step-by-step guide on compliance. It gives the Trust center for free, which some competitors do not. They keep updating it because they listen to their customer's needs.

Inconvénients

The templates for policies need a little update. Vendor assessment - a security questionnaire would be a nice-to-have as we'd like for our contractors to take a security awareness training, respond to some questions, and/or provide us with responses to a security questionnaire.

Avantages

Vanta is continually growing to provide its clients with top-tier compliance tracking. While some pieces are still managed manually, that number is dwindling as Vanta continue to expand on their already extensive automated services. Vanta support is outstanding. Vanta also makes understanding compliance targets and requirements easy.

Inconvénients

The frequent changes that Vanta undergoes as they continue to improve their platform can be mildly disruptive, but the payoff is always worth it.
They integrate with some of the key components of our software stack but we'd like to see more as it relates to provisioning/deprovisioning, vendor management/security assessment, and MDMs.

Avantages

I love how easy it is to understand, the service and support. When I was first introduced to Vanta it was already set up, and while I was trying to put all the puzzle pieces together all I did was go in every day, attend/watch some webinars, my CSM has been great and it didn't take long for me to start to understand. I love that they take my feedback and pass it on to their team.

Inconvénients

There was an update to the homepage, however their support team shared a quick tip on how to view the testing page ANNNND took my feedback to the why

Avantages

User interface was intuitive - provided a clear "checklist" approach for actions to take and problems to resolve. Vanta Agent (for our laptops and (virtual) servers at AWS) is very useful to ensure continuous oversight of what's on the machine and when it needs to be updated. Working with our auditor to get our first SOC2 was also seamless and painless - the auditor plugged right into our Vanta instance and downloaded/monitored everything remotely - no need for screen shots or sending lots of documentation.

Inconvénients

Would have been nice to have more integrations with some of our existing tools (monday.com, AWS Code Commit, etc.) to make the process even more automated. The automated policy generator is nice for filling holes in an existing policy suite, but isn't great if you have to make a lot of customizations to it as the "automated" part breaks down once you edit it offline. Two minor things in an overall great experience.

Avantages

I really like how easy it is to use. It saves a ton of time when dealing with compliance and security tasks, especially compared to doing everything manually. The dashboards are well-designed, so it’s easy to see what needs attention and track progress without getting lost. It feels like it’s made for busy teams that don’t want to waste time figuring out complicated systems.

Inconvénients

Sometimes there are just too many notifications or reminders, and it can feel a bit overwhelming if you’re trying to focus on other tasks. It’d be great if there was a way to customize them more, like turning off ones that aren’t super urgent. Also, some integrations could work smoother, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

Avantages

As a software engineer in charge of preparing our cloud infrastructure for security compliance, I really enjoy the automated tests that Vanta deploys to our cloud providers. These tests are comprehensive. They would take us months to create ourselves. I am happy Vanta does this for us.

Inconvénients

I do not know how to efficiently triage the information I get from Vanta notifications. I get a lot of notifications about failing automated tests in my email and in my Slack. I get "alarm fatigue" and end up ignoring most of the notifications.

Avantages

I use Vanta every day for my work in compliance. The main Tasks page is extremely helpful in flagging and identifying where I need to focus my attention, which allows me to efficiently spend my energy. Being part of a smaller company (for now!), this platform was invaluable during our SOC 2 audit as a source of evidence for many technical and operational controls. My favorite features include a space for hosting security policies (they have so many awesome customizable templates, too) and tracking who has reviewed and accepted them, allowing real-time reporting on technical controls that our customers can view, and vendor and other inventories to keep track of our resources.

Inconvénients

I look forward to seeing more product enhancements in the future. I would love to see more integrations or an admin-facing API so that the same groups and dates used in our identity platforms aligned here, and other user-experience efficiencies like bulk sending email reminders or viewing a person's onboarding tasks plus their assigned computer's information within one row on the same page.

Avantages

Ease of use, support and expertise and confidence in remaining compliant before and after the real SOC-2 process.

Inconvénients

Only critique is that when we started, Vanta was very new to the market and they lacked some integrations. However, we saw rapid improvements and additional integrations during our initial work with them and they were very responsive to our needs.

Avantages

The automation, templates, features and support. The ability to view and remediate the issues with people and hardware was very useful. The document templates were very helpful in getting them done quickly.

Inconvénients

One or two brief bugs in the software. They were resolved quickly!

Avantages

Vanta keeps track of our device inventory and cloud resources. Integration to our systems is seamless. The software is easy to set up and has a few great dashboards for monitoring and addressing vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

Inconvénients

It is fairly easy to trick Vanta into passing a certain compliance check. It's up to the implementer of the security measures to check carefully that the resources are in compliance, since Vanta can at times provide false positives.

Avantages

Extensive integrations made it very easy to audit our entire infrastructure. Without Vanta, gathering critical evidence for our SOC 2 audit would have been a pain.

Inconvénients

I wish the platform could be extended to other popular certifications such as PCI .

Avantages

In the past we navigated our HIPAA compliance on our own. There was just too much to keep track of. Vanta has made it really easy to know if we're compliant or if there are issues we need to address.

Inconvénients

There aren't really any cons. The training videos for employees are cheesy, but I don't think there's any way around that :)

Avantages

Vanta makes it easy by giving you a dashboard to check regressions, and gives you easy templates of complying policies to implement in your organization.

Inconvénients

The dashboard is web-UI only. An API would be nice, or even better - integrations with our existing issue trackers.

Avantages

* Clean, simple, easy to use.
* Policy generation is particularly magical.
* Brings structure and order to the SOC compliance mess.

Overall, Vanta has gamified aspects of compliance to the point where I no longer dread or fear it. It's actually kinda fun.

Inconvénients

Could use more integrations. Once you go off the beaten path, you're fully on your own.

Avantages

Easy to get overiew about your systems in use and compliance check list.

Inconvénients

In general not sure about overall security.

Avantages

Software is intuitive, the policies alone are worth the cost, and I'm impressed by how Vanta continually expands coverage and functionality.

Inconvénients

There really isn't anything I don't like about the software.