Why outside-in beats a questionnaire.

Q: Is an outside-in rating fair to the company being assessed?

It is the same rubric for everyone, applied to what their infrastructure publishes to the internet. There is no questionnaire to answer well or badly, and disagreement has a concrete remedy: fix the finding and the next scan reflects it.

Q: Does a score replace a security review?

No. It replaces the part of a review that consists of asking a company to describe itself and hoping the description is current. Contractual, legal and operational review still belongs to your team.

Q: What can an outside-in view not see?

Anything not exposed to the public internet: internal segmentation, endpoint controls, staff training, physical security. We are explicit about that boundary rather than implying the score covers everything.

Q: Why does breadth matter more than the number?

Two platforms can give the same company a similar score from entirely different evidence. What changes a decision is the specific finding (a lookalike domain, a credential in breach data, a failed control) not the number attached to it.

A questionnaire records what a vendor said about themselves on one day. An outside-in rating records what their infrastructure actually shows the internet, today, on the same scale for every company you assess, with the evidence attached.

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Same rubric for every company. No cooperation required from the company being assessed.

Used by teams at

What changes when you stop asking and start observing

Most vendor reviews today run on annual questionnaires. Here’s the practical difference.

	Annual questionnaire	Guardian Gaze Enterprise
How current it is	Answers from whenever the vendor filled it in, usually months old.	Scores update continuously from live scans.
What backs it up	The vendor’s own answers.	Each finding links to a dated scan result you can open.
Work for the vendor	Long forms, several rounds of chasing.	Nothing. The scan is external.
Comparing vendors	Difficult, every vendor answers differently.	Same score scale and method for every company.
When a vendor disagrees	Email threads.	They fix the finding, the next scan picks it up, the score updates.

Where the difference shows up first

Internal

Your own external posture

Score yourself first. It's free, and it shows you exactly what the platform sees.

Procurement

Vendor onboarding

Check a vendor's score before you sign, instead of sending them a 200-question spreadsheet.

Risk

Third-party risk

Keep a score on every supplier and get an alert when one drops.

Risk

Provider concentration

See which providers your suppliers share, and how much of the portfolio one outage would take with it.

Insurance

Cyber insurance

Bring an evidence-backed score to renewal instead of a self-filled questionnaire.

Corp dev

Mergers and acquisitions

Score a target company before diligence starts.

Procurement

RFP scoring

Attach a current security score to each bid so bids are comparable.

Leadership

Board reporting

A trend report the board can read without a translator.

Ops

Situational awareness

When something big hits the news, check your whole portfolio for it in one view.

“Our vendor review used to be a quarterly spreadsheet. Now it’s a dashboard we check weekly. When a critical supplier’s score dropped, we called them about it before their own team had noticed.”

CISO · Mid-market financial services group

Common questions

Is an outside-in rating fair to the company being assessed?

What can an outside-in view not see?

Does a score replace a security review?

Why does breadth matter more than the number?

Start with your own company's rating

It’s free, takes about a day, and shows you exactly what the platform would show you about your vendors. Plans start at £1,200 per month.

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