Highlights –

  • Whistic will be providing vendors access to a free version of Whistic Profile, which would help:
  • Eliminate time-consuming questionnaire requests.
  • Access Whistic’s extensive library of standard questionnaires to build their profile.
  • Share their profile with customers up to three times per month.
  • The initiative will help overcome third-party data breaches through Whistic Profiles as a standard for assessing, publishing, and sharing security information.

Whistic, which built a network for assessing, publishing, and sharing vendor security information, will work with tech companies like Okta, Airbnb, Zendesk, Asana, Atlassian, Snap, Notion, TripActions, and G2 by forming The Security First Initiative. These tech firms have come together to address the increased importance of transparency between vendors and their customers. The group promises to prioritize security by proactively sharing their security information with their customers using a Whistic Profile and motivating all companies to do the same.

Founding members of The Security First initiative have actively adopted the Whistic Profile as the industry standard for assessing, publishing and sharing security information. Today, more than 40,000 profiles are available on-demand in the Whistic Vendor Security Network. Every month, thousands of buyers accept a Whistic Profile in lieu of requesting a questionnaire to satisfy their vendor assessment requirements. This growing popular vendor security strategy has gained trust and transparency while automating the previously-used reactive, manual processes.

View’s from Security First founding members

Nick Sorensen, CEO of Whistic, said, “The future of vendor security must be built on a foundation of collaboration. That’s why we’re excited to unite with a coalition of some of the world’s leading technology companies to create a new expectation where security comes first. This dual-sided network approach to vendor security is the only way to meet the needs of both buyers and sellers in the ecosystem. It’s also the most efficient way to make transparency the expectation in vendor security, and when that happens, everybody wins.”

Genevieve Buckley, Senior Manager, Customer Assurance at Okta, said, “Okta supports the Security First Initiative and the recently released MVSP security baseline, both of which demonstrate the importance of working together to improve security for all our mutual customers. Okta has added MVSP to our Whistic Profile and we look forward to seeing more service providers adopt this baseline in their profiles.”

Sean Cassidy, Head of Security at Asana, said, “Just like Asana believes collaboration and transparency between internal teams is mission critical, we also believe it’s mission critical to establish transparent and trusted relationships with our customers and third-party vendors. That’s why we’re excited to join with so many leading companies and see the industry collectively embrace the Security First Initiative.”

Prabhath Karanth, Head of Security Assurance and Compliance at TripActions, said, “Trust and transparency are key to doing business and we take customer trust very seriously. We proactively share our security documentation through our Whistic Profile in a secure manner, and we’re excited to start seeing more and more of our vendors with Whistic Profiles ready to share with us before we ask.”

Godard Abel, Co-founder and CEO of G2, said, “In our 2021 Buyer Behavior Report, G2 found that security is now the #1 consideration for buyers in the purchasing process. G2 is not only committed to trust and transparency as a company, but we see it as core to every business relationship in the future.”