How Tines Saves 50% of Time Spent on Security Questionnaire Responses & Streamlines Secure Document Sharing

Overview:

Tines is a SaaS company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, specializing in workflow automation and orchestration designed for security and IT teams. As Head of IT Operations & Information Security, Brandon Maxwell leads efforts in IT, security and compliance, ensuring adherence to regulations and standards such as SOC-2, across Tines’ global operations. Inundated with security questionnaires, Brandon turned to HyperComply, reducing the average time spent on questionnaires to just 33 minutes and removing the friction between teams.

Background:

Before adopting HyperComply, managing security questionnaires presented significant challenges for Tines. With a small, lean team and growing demands, Brandon found himself manually handling lengthy security questionnaires and security artifact requests to support customers. This resulted in delays in responses, ultimately risking the progression of sales deals. This process lacked scalability and efficiency.

Challenges:

1. Long Manual Process: Brandon found himself inundated with in-depth security questionnaires from customers, and was spending hours on manual responses that lived in his mind and numerous Google docs. This process was time-consuming, prone to human error, and severely lacked scalability.

2. Inconsistencies: The manual handling of security questionnaires and security document requests increased the risk of inconsistencies in the responses provided.

3. Delayed Responses → Delayed Sales: The time required to respond to security questionnaires was lengthy and led to delays as they all required intervention from Brandon and his team. These delays not only frustrated internal stakeholders but also jeopardized Tines’ ability to swiftly close sales deals and maintain operational excellence.

4. Inefficiency in Evidence Sharing: Manually attending to each security request and sharing security information via email was inefficient. The fragmented and cumbersome NDA processes further delayed evidence sharing.

"I was answering all of the questionnaires myself. Just going through them, realizing ‘hey, this is not going to scale, we need some sort of way to distribute this work to give our customer-facing teams the power to complete these themselves. I realized that we need a database or somewhere to store and keep this data up to date as well other than you know, just in my head."

Solution:

These challenges prompted Brandon to look for a solution. He evaluated a variety of them, but ultimately chose HyperComply for its comprehensive hybrid service model. HyperComply offered a balanced approach, combining self-service capabilities with expert support, and Data Rooms for secure evidence sharing, aligning perfectly with Tines' requirements.

"The service model that HyperComply had was very appealing, where we had the ability to be able to search questions. If we wanted to self-serve we could, but also having that capacity there on HyperComply's side to help us complete those we submitted and doing QA, just felt like the right mix for us."

Impact:

HyperComply transformed Tines' approach to security questionnaire management and evidence sharing:

1. Time Efficiency: Average questionnaire completion time decreased by 50%, from an average of about an hour spent per questionnaire down to just 33 minutes.

2. Standardization: Responses became standardized with the ability to easily manage security knowledge, reducing the risk of outdated or inaccurate information being shared during security assessments.

3. Operational Streamlining: The Self Import tool (Respond AI) empowers Tines' sales and customer success teams to initiate and complete questionnaires independently, and/or submit to HyperComply. This allows Brandon and his team to focus on strategic initiatives and act as subject matter experts doing a final pass on completed security questionnaires rather than answering from scratch every time.

"HyperComply helps us get questionnaires done sooner to help speed up that sales process to make sure that the AEs, SEs and whoever is involved are able to get those questions back to the prospects and customers as quickly as possible and be able to close those deals."

‍4. Enhanced Compliance: Data Rooms has facilitated seamless security evidence sharing and management, centralizing all necessary documentation and providing Brandon and his team with a clear audit log of interactions with these documents.

Conclusion:

Tines has leveraged HyperComply to make notable operational changes by streamlining how they handle security questionnaires and share security evidence. By improving how security information is shared, and collaboration between departments, Tines has implemented HyperComply as a security and sales enablement tool.

The solution has made a large impact on empowering Tines’ Sales and Customer Success teams to get security questionnaires started themselves, boosting operational efficiency and allowing the Security team to focus on other high-value activities. Overall, the solution has supported the company's revenue growth, improved internal and external security operations, and has led to increased stakeholder satisfaction.

"With HyperComply, there’s less apprehension making sure that we're not going to miss any deadlines or have to spend too much time on just one questionnaire. We know our answers are standardized and that whatever information we're passing along is the most recent, most up-to-date, and truthful."