Learn everything about Product Level Answers, a new Risk Ledger product feature that allows suppliers to accurately represent the true nature of their security controls across multiple products and services, while giving clients the granular visibility they need to make informed risk decisions.
Earlier this month, we launched Product Level Answers, a fundamental update to our assessment that allows suppliers to accurately represent varying security controls across multiple products, within a single profile.
Instead of maintaining separate accounts or duplicating information, suppliers can set organisational-level answers as a baseline and highlight the differences where security controls vary by product. Suppliers can then share precise and relevant information with each client and Clients can clearly identify security control variations across different products, leading to more accurate risk assessments.
Learn more about Product Level Answers here
In this blog post, we’re sharing why we built this, how it offers better visibility, and how it ultimately helps companies improve the overall security of their supply chains.
Risk Ledger's mission has always been to improve the security of the global supply chain, reducing the number and impact of attacks experienced through third parties. As we've worked closely with our clients and suppliers, we identified a fundamental gap in how traditional third-party risk management tools approach security assessments.
Most security frameworks operate with a basic assumption that security controls apply uniformly across an entire organisation. The reality, however, is far more nuanced. Modern organisations rarely offer just one product or service. A single supplier might deliver multiple software solutions, each with its own security architecture. They might provide both cloud and on-premises versions of products with necessarily different security controls. A large enterprise may have distinct business units with varying security postures.
Yet traditional security assessments ask suppliers to provide a single answer for each control question, forcing them to collapse this complexity into generic responses that don't accurately reflect their security reality.
While security reality is nuanced across products, suppliers have been forced into a difficult choice: either oversimplify their security controls to fit an assessment or create unwieldy workarounds.
Neither option provides clients with the accurate visibility they need for proper risk assessment. As one user put it, "We struggle to assess large suppliers like Google and Microsoft, to understand their organisation-level security controls versus the controls for the products and services they provide".
For Suppliers, this has meant:
For Clients, the consequences can be serious:
The challenges suppliers and clients faced weren't just operational headaches, they represented real security risks through incomplete information and visibility gaps. When we saw suppliers struggling to maintain accuracy across multiple profiles and clients making decisions without product-specific security context, we recognised this as a fundamental limitation in supply chain security management.
This insight drove our development priorities, leading to this month's launch of Product Level Answers. Rather than forcing suppliers to choose between accuracy and efficiency, we've created a structured way to maintain baseline organisational controls while clearly highlighting product-specific variations—all within a single, manageable profile.
Product Level Answers enables suppliers to:
For clients who previously lacked visibility into product-specific controls, this represents a significant advancement in their ability to conduct precise risk assessments and maintain operational resilience across complex supply chains.
Learn more about Product Level Answers here
Product Level Answers delivers transformative value across our entire network, solving challenges for both suppliers and clients.
For suppliers
Complex suppliers offering multiple products and services with varying security controls can accurately represent their security reality without administrative overhead, and have more productive security conversations with clients.
These suppliers could be:
As one early adopter said, "This is going to be transformative for us. Having to maintain multiple profiles for different products has been a huge administrative burden."
For clients
On the other hand, organisations that need to understand how security controls vary across supplier products can also benefit greatly from this enhanced visibility.
These companies could be:
With more granular security information, they’ll be able to make more precise risk assessments, better respond to security incidents, and enhance their operational resilience planning.
Since launching at the start of the month, we’ve already shipped a few enhancements:
For Suppliers
For Clients
Product Level Answers represents a foundational shift in how we approach security assessment, but it's just the beginning. As we continue to develop this capability, we'll introduce more advanced features for reporting, comparison, and visualisation that will unlock even greater value for our customers.
When the next major security incident occurs, clients will be able to quickly determine which specific supplier products might be affected, rather than making broad assumptions about entire organisations. Suppliers can provide accurate, product-specific information without administrative overhead.
The future of third-party risk management requires both breadth and depth—maintaining a holistic view of organisational security while enabling the granular assessment necessary to make truly informed risk decisions about specific products and services.
By building Product Level Answers, we've taken an important step toward that future—making security reality visible and helping our customers build more secure, resilient supply chains.
If you're interested in learning more about Product Level Answers and how it can transform your approach to third-party risk management, contact your Risk Ledger Customer Success Manager or schedule a demo today.
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