What a VRA actually is
A Vendor Risk Assessment (VRA) is a structured evaluation process that Enterprise clients use to assess the security posture of their potential suppliers before signing a contract. It typically takes the form of a questionnaire with 50-300 questions covering areas like access management, data encryption, incident response, vulnerability management and change control.
For Polish software houses and SaaS companies selling to banks, insurers and corporations from the US, UK and DACH region — VRA is increasingly the bottleneck that determines whether a deal closes or stalls for months.
What the analysts look for
The security team reviewing your VRA responses is not checking boxes. They are looking for three things:
Consistency. Do your answers tell a coherent story? If you claim to have MFA enforced but can’t describe your identity provider, that’s a red flag. If you say you do penetration testing but can’t produce a report — the inconsistency is noted.
Evidence over declarations. “We follow best practices” is the worst possible answer. “MFA enforced via GitHub SAML SSO, verified by org member export — 100% compliance, screenshot in Appendix A” is the answer that moves the process forward.
Knowledge of your own environment. Questions like “how do you manage secrets in your CI/CD pipeline?” test whether you understand your own infrastructure. A vague answer suggests you haven’t thought about it. A specific answer (OIDC federation, automatic rotation, TruffleHog scanning) suggests maturity.
The questions that block deals
From our experience, the most common blocking questions relate to: CI/CD secret management, code review enforcement, vulnerability scanning frequency, change management process, and incident response procedure. These map directly to pipeline configuration — and can be answered with concrete evidence if the hardening is done.
How an Evidence Pack changes the conversation
Instead of answering each question from scratch, an Evidence Pack provides pre-assembled documentation mapping technical controls to common VRA questions. OIDC configuration → secret management answer. Branch protection rules → change management answer. Trivy scan results → vulnerability management answer. The VRA becomes a mapping exercise, not a research project.
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