Governance, Risk & Compliance
Third party vendor audit services start where the questionnaire stops. A supplier assessment tells you what a vendor says about itself. An audit tests it: sampling evidence, walking through the control, and establishing whether the practice matches the policy for the specific service you are buying.
Audits are expensive relative to questionnaires, which is exactly why they are reserved for the small number of suppliers whose failure would materially hurt you: the ones holding regulated data, holding privileged access to your network, or standing between you and your own customers. Tiering that population is part of third-party risk management; auditing the top of it is this service.
We audit against the framework your obligations demand and against the contract you actually signed, on site or remotely, and we report findings with severity, evidence and a remediation plan the vendor has agreed to. Where the vendor holds a SOC 2 report or an ISO 27001:2022 certificate, we validate its scope rather than accept it at face value.
Why you need it
01 / 06Questionnaires are completed by people with an interest in a good answer, frequently by a sales team rather than a security team. They are a reasonable filter and they are not verification. The difference matters for the handful of vendors that could actually hurt you.
An ISO 27001:2022 certificate may cover a head office and not the delivery centre that runs your service. A SOC 2 report may exclude the product you bought, or cover a period that ended fourteen months ago. Reading the scope properly is often the whole finding.
Breach notification windows, sub-processor approval, data location, encryption standards, service levels and audit rights are negotiated carefully and then filed. An audit is where anyone checks whether the vendor has been meeting them.
Financial and healthcare regulators increasingly ask what you did to verify a critical supplier, not what the supplier told you. A documented audit with findings tracked to closure is the answer to that question.
Instrument
02 / 06Ten typical vendors placed by what they can reach and how badly you depend on them. Audits belong to the top-right square, not to everyone.
What we deliver
03 / 06A focused examination of specific control areas where your risk actually sits (access management, data handling, encryption, subcontracting) rather than a full-scope review. The proportionate choice for most critical vendors.
A full review of the vendor's security environment against ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 criteria or your own control standard, covering governance, technical controls, operations and personnel security for the service you buy.
Reading what the vendor supplied properly: the scope statement and Statement of Applicability behind an ISO 27001:2022 certificate, and the system description, period, exceptions and complementary user entity controls in a SOC 2 report. The last of these lists obligations the report quietly transfers back to you.
Testing the vendor against the agreement you signed: service levels, breach notification, data location and residency, sub-processor disclosure and approval, encryption commitments, retention and deletion, and audit rights.
Where the contract permits and the risk warrants, verifying rather than accepting: external security posture, evidence of penetration testing and its findings, patch and vulnerability management records, and access control configuration in the environment holding your data.
Findings rated by severity with evidence attached, a remediation plan agreed with the vendor and dated, follow-up verification, and a report written for both your risk committee and your regulator.
How we run it
04 / 06Confirming your contractual right to audit, agreeing scope and framework with the vendor, and setting the schedule. Where the contract is silent, we help negotiate access, which is considerably easier at renewal than mid-term.
Weeks 1-2Policies, certificates and their scopes, prior audit and penetration test reports, network and data-flow documentation, sub-processor list and incident history, reviewed before fieldwork so that time on site is spent testing rather than reading.
Weeks 2-3On site or remote: interviews with the people who operate the controls, walkthroughs of the process, and evidence sampled across a period rather than at a point. Where the vendor delivers from multiple locations, the one serving you is the one we visit.
Weeks 3-4Design effectiveness first, then operating effectiveness through sampling: access provisioning and review records, change approvals, backup and restoration evidence, incident records, and training completion.
Weeks 3-4Findings rated by severity with the evidence behind each, a management response from the vendor, and a report written to be read by your risk committee, your customer or your regulator.
Week 5An agreed remediation plan with owners and dates, verification that fixes were made, and where a vendor will not remediate, a documented compensating control or accepted risk with a named owner on your side.
Weeks 6-12Key benefits
05 / 06Scope statements, report periods and exceptions read properly, so assurance documents are evidence rather than decoration.
Notification windows, data location and sub-processor obligations tested against practice, while there is still leverage to correct them.
A documented audit with findings tracked to closure is what a regulator or an enterprise customer means when they ask how you oversee critical suppliers.
Tools we use
06 / 06No “latest tech tools”. These are the ones your report will cite, alongside the manual work that a tool cannot do for you.
Audit frameworks
Evidence review
Technical verification
Contract testing
Reporting
Why Aphelion
SharedDarshap Nayak, formerly of KPMG, holds a master’s degree in cybersecurity and more than seven years in security operations. Jaimin Somani brings fifteen-plus years of academic and hands-on VAPT. Hemang Desai is an ICT network specialist from Australia. You will meet them, not a logo.
Meet the teamEvery finding arrives with the reproduction steps, the affected asset and the fix, ranked by what it actually reaches in your environment, not by a CVSS number copied from a scanner. You get the report and the raw output, not a summary of a summary.
See how we testAhmedabad and Sharjah, working the same methodology on the same tooling. Indian data-residency requirements and UAE delivery are both ordinary here, and the AphelioNYX AD Pen-Test module runs entirely inside your perimeter when regulation says it must.
The platformInvent a statistic to make a slide land. Publish your name as a client without written permission. Print an award badge nobody awarded. Founded in 2024. We say so, and we attribute experience to the people who have it.
Ask us anythingAcross the globe, and across eight industries. We name a client only with their written permission.
AphelioNYX is SOC 2, ISO and GDPR compliant; attestations are available on request under NDA. We would rather hand you the report than print a badge.
Questions
FAQNext door
RelatedA personalised walkthrough and a free readiness assessment against the frameworks you are actually being asked for. Pick a time that suits you, or write to us. We reply within one business day.