Most third-party risk management programs run outside the platform that holds everything else. The work usually lives in a spreadsheet, where someone on your team tracks whether a vendor has been breached and whether their System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 report is current and still meets your security and privacy obligations.
That is easy to fall behind on. A vendor’s report expires without anyone noticing, or you hear about their security incident after the fact. And because the spreadsheet sits outside your platform, none of that work reaches your reporting or your audit evidence.
Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) in Carbide moves that work inside the platform.
How a scan works
You enable scanning on the vendor record and supply the URLs you have. The vendor’s website is the only one required. Their application, security page, and privacy policy are optional, and filling in all four improves the accuracy of what comes back. Findings land in the Scans tab on that vendor record.
From there it repeats on its own. TPRM rescans ten vendors every week by default, so the vendors that matter most stay current without anyone remembering to run them. If ten is the wrong number for your program, email support@carbidesecure.com to change it.
Each scan works in three layers. Technical collectors gather Domain Name System (DNS) lookups, website headers, domain registration, and reputation findings. Those findings are risk flagged and normalized. Carbide Analyst, Carbide’s AI, then turns them into a report that opens with an executive summary and an assigned risk tier with its rationale written out, followed by the top concerns, the evidence gaps that limited the analysis, and suggested controls for your own program.
An assessment written for your organization
What makes the assessment yours is the context behind it. Carbide takes into account everything in your organization profile, including where your customers are and your security and regulatory objectives, and pairs it with your description of how you actually use the vendor. Documents attached to the vendor are analyzed as part of the assessment, from a SOC 2 report or an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 certificate through to the contract itself.
When you supply a privacy policy URL, the policy text is read for anything that conflicts with your obligations, such as cross-border transfers of your data. The same vendor can carry a different tier for two customers, because the two customers are not exposed the same way.
That context also shapes what you ask the vendor. Say you operate under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Carbide looks at what you do and where you operate, flags the vendor findings that touch those obligations, and raises them in that vendor’s security questionnaire.
When the analysis is missing something, the report says so and flags where a questionnaire is warranted. The questionnaire Carbide Analyst generates is built from that vendor’s scan results together with what the platform already holds about your compliance program, so it asks the vendor about the gaps that matter to you. You review it before anything goes to the vendor.
Run the whole review from your AI tool
Third-Party Risk Management also connects to any AI tool that supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that lets an AI assistant read and act on your data in Carbide. You can run a vendor review end to end from a conversation.
Give your AI tool the vendor’s website details and it sets up the vendor and launches the scan. When the report comes back with evidence gaps, ask it to create the questionnaire and send it to the vendor contact’s email address. Nothing goes out until you ask for it.
The vendor’s answers come back into Carbide. Carbide processes them against your security program and shows which findings the answers resolved. Those answers carry into the next scan, so the vendor’s risk tier comes down as gaps close. All of it feeds your reporting and the audit manager, so the record of how you assessed each vendor is already in place when an auditor asks for it.
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