The Evidence Overload Problem: Why Third-Party Risk Management Teams Are Drowning in Documentation

5 minute read

June 2025

by Sophia Corsetti

In third-party risk management (TPRM), evidence documentation is everything. It’s how third parties prove they have controls in place, giving risk teams insight into the implementation and maintenance of critical controls. Unfortunately, in today’s overwhelming TPRM environment, the focus on document reviews is less of an information add and more of a bottleneck for risk analysts to manage.

Analysts know the drill: a third party’s SOC 2 reports arrive in email inboxes or attached to returned assessments, filled with dense paragraphs and attestations that require further validation. Security policies with dozens of pages are uploaded to portals in inconsistent formats. Questionnaires come back half-complete, or with jargon that requires a forensic level of analysis just to score them properly.

And all of it needs to be reviewed, assessed, cross-referenced, and validated — manually.

Breaking down the evidence overload problem, here are three key pain points felt across the document review process:

1. Third-Party Evidence: You Can’t Avoid It, but You Also Can’t Keep Up

The role of evidence in the third-party risk assessment process cannot be overstated. It’s the foundation for determining if a third party can be trusted to share data with, or if their controls changed since a previous assessment period or discovered vulnerability. But with the way evidence is currently handled, teams struggle to sort through pages and pages of evidence in a timely manner.

Third-party risk teams often spend days— even weeks— reviewing just one set of evidence documents. SOC 2s alone can be 80+ pages long. Think about it this way: If a company has 500 third parties, and they have an average of 30 documents to review per third party, each with around 1,800 words, then your team must read 27 million words per year. Think about how document review is only one piece of third-party risk management, and suddenly your risk program is spending more time reading and piecing together puzzles than truly mitigating risk.

To make matters worse, the time investment rarely matches the outcome. With so many documents to get through, evidence reviews are often rushed or inconsistent. Some analysts are doing deep dives; others skim, which can lead to varying interpretations of a vendor’s security controls.

While teams are doing their best with the resources they have, the lack of standardization opens the door to missed security vulnerabilities and compliance risks.

2. Review Cycles Keep Slowing Down – And Both Sides Are Feeling It

Evidence overload is not limited to internal risk teams. It is also felt by the third parties being assessed.

Most third parties are inundated with assessment requests from customers using different formats, standards, and expectations. Naturally, they default to providing the quickest solution: existing documentation. Artifacts including SOC 2s, completed SIG questionnaires, ISO certifications, and internal policy documents are a common choice for third parties receiving evidence requests from each customer they work with.

That may save time for the third party, but it increases the workload for risk analysts. They’re left to decode lengthy documents and map oftentimes vague answers back to control frameworks.

As a result, assessment cycles get longer and cause quite a roadblock. What should take days sometimes takes weeks, even months — not because third parties are uncooperative, but because documentation reviews take so long the way they are currently being done.

3. The Risk of Manual Inconsistency

Even when teams are diligent, the process of reviewing the onslaught of documentation is inherently flawed. Manual reviews are prone to:

  • Variability: Different analysts interpret the same document differently, leading to inconsistent reviews across one team.
  • Burnout: Endless reading and scoring of documents leads to fatigue, and subsequently, missed issues and incorrect conclusions.
  • Lack of traceability: Without structured analysis, it’s hard to explain why something passed or failed.

This is particularly problematic for organizations facing audits or regulatory scrutiny. When the review process isn’t standardized, it’s harder to defend decisions or show a consistent methodology.

AI Is the Answer — If It’s Built & Trained the Right Way

Given the pain points felt across TPRM teams and their third-party counterparts when it comes to handling evidence review efficiently and accurately, it’s no surprise that AI is emerging as a transformative force in third-party risk. But let’s be clear: not all AI is created equal.

There’s real skepticism about whether AI can be trusted to read sensitive security documents accurately. Teams worry about:

  • Privacy: Will my data be exposed to public models?
  • Accuracy: Can an AI product understand the nuances of cybersecurity and other risk domains like a trained analyst does?
  • Integration: Will this tool work with the systems and platforms I have in place?

These concerns are valid, and are why using purpose-built, risk-aware AI matters.

From Days to Seconds: A Better Way to Review Evidence

Imagine reviewing a SOC 2 not in hours or days, but in seconds.

That’s the environment that ProcessUnity built for TPRM teams and their third parties that struggle with the demands of reviewing risk documents.

We created Evidence Evaluator to solve the document overload problem once and for all. Evidence Evaluator is a purpose-built Gen AI engine designed specifically for third-party risk professionals. Instead of spending hours reading and sorting through documents, Evidence Evaluator reads them for you — extracting relevant controls, mapping them to your specific frameworks, identifying gaps, and summarizing third-party risks.

Evidence Evaluator also cites its sources, meaning it not only summarizes the risk documentation, but lists where in which document a given piece of evidence is located. This way decision-making happens faster and more accurately, without having to spend the valuable internal team’s time reading through documentation.

What used to be a manual, inconsistent process is now streamlined, accurate, and fast.
It’s not just automation, it’s intelligent analysis, tailored to how risk team’s work.

Get a First Look at Evidence Evaluator

If evidence overload is slowing down your third-party risk program and costing your team valuable time, you have a chance to be one of the first to jump into Evidence Evaluator.

Watch our on-demand webinar for an exclusive look at how Evidence Evaluator works, including a demo and Q&A with our product experts. Watch here.

If you’re ready to see how the AI TPRM technology applies to your business, you can request a demo today.

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About Us

ProcessUnity is a leading provider of cloud-based applications for risk and compliance management. The company’s software as a service (SaaS) platform gives organizations the control to assess, measure, and mitigate risk and to ensure the optimal performance of key business processes. ProcessUnity’s flagship solution, ProcessUnity Vendor Risk Management, protects companies and their brands by reducing risks from third-party vendors and suppliers. ProcessUnity helps customers effectively and efficiently assess and monitor both new and existing vendors – from initial due diligence and onboarding through termination. Headquartered outside of Boston, Massachusetts, ProcessUnity is used by the world’s leading financial service firms and commercial enterprises. For more information, visit www.processunity.com.