The Vendor Security Dance: How Both Sides Can Move Faster

Brian Sierakowski - Founder

“I’d have to engage with our security guys. It’s our IP.”

An engineering lead said this to me recently during a call about setting up a product demo. He wasn’t being obstructive. He wanted to move forward. But he knew the conversation couldn’t progress until his security team signed off.

Twenty minutes later, he’d already reached out to them.

This is how security reviews should work: not as adversarial standoffs, but as structured conversations where both sides move toward the same goal. The reality is that most security reviews stall not because of fundamental incompatibility, but because of friction in the process itself.

Here’s how to make them faster, whether you’re the vendor or the buyer.

The Usual Breakdown

Security evaluations fail in predictable ways.

From the vendor side: You send a sales engineer who doesn’t know the security architecture. Questions go unanswered for days. Someone buried the SOC 2 report in a legal folder somewhere. Every security question feels like an accusation.

From the buyer side: You send a checklist of 200 questions, half of which don’t apply. Security gets looped in at the last minute. Nobody has authority to make tradeoffs. The evaluation drags on while the business team gets frustrated.

The result: A deal that should close in two weeks takes two months. Or dies entirely because someone got tired of waiting.

What the Best Evaluations Have in Common

The fastest security reviews I’ve been part of share a few patterns.

1. Security Gets Involved Early

A technical contact at an enterprise software company told me his approach: within twenty minutes of our call, he’d already pinged his security team to start the review. He didn’t wait until the deal was “ready.” He started the security conversation in parallel with the technical evaluation.

This matters because security teams have their own backlogs. If you wait until you’ve made the business decision before involving them, you’re adding their queue time on top of everything else.

For vendors: ask in the first call who the security stakeholders are. Offer to send documentation proactively.

For buyers: brief your security team on what you’re evaluating before you need their approval. Give them a heads up, not a surprise.

2. Both Sides Come Prepared with Documentation

The worst security reviews are discovery exercises disguised as evaluations. Neither side has documentation ready, so every question requires research.

For vendors, this means having ready:

  • SOC 2 Type II reports (not just badges)
  • Data flow diagrams showing what goes where
  • Clear explanations of LLM/AI data handling if applicable
  • Architecture documentation for self-service review
  • Incident response procedures

For buyers, this means having ready:

  • Your actual requirements, not a generic checklist
  • Authority to make tradeoffs (or access to someone who does)
  • Clarity on what’s blocking versus nice-to-have
  • Timeline expectations

A founder told me during a recent call that his main security question was about LLM data handling: what code snippets get transmitted to external providers. That’s a fair question. A vendor who can’t answer it in detail shouldn’t have code access.

3. There’s a Clear Path to “Yes” (or “No”)

The most frustrating evaluations are the ones where security keeps finding new concerns without ever articulating what “done” looks like.

For buyers: before starting the review, define what approval looks like. Is it checking boxes on a compliance framework? Is it a specific person’s sign-off? Is it a risk assessment with documented mitigations?

For vendors: ask explicitly what the approval criteria are. “What would need to be true for your security team to be comfortable with this?” is a better question than “Do you have any security concerns?“

4. Alternative Approaches Get Discussed

During a recent evaluation, an engineering lead had concerns about granting our GitHub integration full repo access. His first instinct was to decline. But we talked through alternatives.

What if we used a point-in-time snapshot instead of live access? What if they created a private repo, pushed a clone, and controlled permissions on their side? What if the connection happened through their account, with their credentials, so nothing touched our systems directly?

The final approach satisfied his security concerns while still letting us show the product. Neither side got exactly what they initially wanted, but both sides got what they needed.

The best security conversations involve tradeoffs, not ultimatums.

The Vendor’s Playbook

If you’re a vendor trying to move security reviews faster:

Lead with transparency. Don’t wait for questions. Proactively share your SOC 2 report, architecture docs, and data handling practices. The companies most worried about security are also the most impressed when you’re open about it.

Know your architecture. Nothing kills trust faster than a salesperson who can’t explain how data flows through the system. Have someone technical available for security calls.

Offer graduated access. Not every evaluation needs full integration. Can you demo with a snapshot? With a subset of repos? With a sandbox environment? The more options you offer, the more likely one fits their constraints.

Respect the process. Security reviews aren’t personal. The team asking hard questions is doing their job. Answer directly, provide documentation, and don’t get defensive.

Document everything. After security calls, send a summary of what you discussed and agreed. This becomes the record that the security team can use for internal approvals.

The Buyer’s Playbook

If you’re a buyer trying to get through security reviews without losing momentum:

Involve security early. As soon as you’re seriously considering a tool that needs access to sensitive systems, loop in your security team. Brief them on what the tool does and why you want it.

Share context. Security teams make better decisions when they understand the business need. “This tool saves us 10 hours per week on release documentation” is more useful than “we want to try this new thing.”

Own the timeline. If you need a decision by a certain date, say so. Security teams can often fast-track reviews when there’s a legitimate business deadline.

Be willing to compromise. Maybe the vendor’s ideal integration doesn’t work for you, but a modified version does. Maybe you start with a pilot on non-sensitive repos and expand later. Rigidity slows everything down.

Get to “no” quickly if needed. Sometimes the security concerns are real dealbreakers. That’s okay. A fast “no” is better than a slow “maybe” that wastes everyone’s time.

The Real Goal

Security reviews exist to manage risk, not remove it. There’s no zero-risk option when you’re integrating with external tools. The question is whether the risk is acceptable given the benefit.

A technical contact explained his team’s approach: “We would need to make sure we do all the changes on our side and flip all the levers to make sure it’s set up the way we want it. But I don’t see any issues of us not being able to reach that goal.”

That’s the right mindset. Not “how do we avoid all risk?” but “how do we structure this so the risk is manageable?”

The security dance doesn’t have to be slow. When both sides come prepared, communicate well, and focus on finding workable solutions, reviews that used to take months can happen in days.

The goal isn’t to skip security. The goal is to do security well, fast.

If you’re evaluating Changebot and need to pass your security review, let’s chat. We’re SOC 2 Type II certified and happy to structure an evaluation that works for your security requirements.