Overview — goal
I would evaluate vendors with a governance checklist that turns qualitative controls into measurable scores so the board can compare risk, compliance fit, and operational maturity.
Checklist (grouped)
- Security (25%)
- Data encryption at rest/in transit; KMS control + HSM support
- Identity: MFA, SSO, SCIM, least-privilege IAM
- Network controls: VPC, private endpoints, WAF, DDoS mitigation
- Security tooling: CSPM, secrets manager, logging, EDR integration
- Compliance & Audit (20%)
- Certifications: SOC2, ISO27001, PCI-DSS, regional (e.g., FINRA, GDPR)
- Audit logs retention, exportability, e-discovery support
- Data residency controls and contractual audit rights
- Global-region support & Resiliency (15%)
- Regions, AZs, sovereign clouds, cross-region replication, latency SLAs
- Disaster recovery patterns, runbooks, demonstrated RTO/RPO
- Platform Services Maturity (15%)
- Managed DBs, K8s, serverless, CI/CD, monitoring — maturity and SLAs
- Marketplace & partner ecosystem, documented best practices
- SLA / SLT & Support (15%)
- Financial SLA terms, uptime %, penalty structure, support tiers, escalation paths
- Maintenance windows, change notification lead times
- Vendor-lock-in Risk (10%)
- Open standards support, data export tooling, service portability, API stability
Scoring approach
- For each sub-item score 0–5 (0 = none, 5 = enterprise-best-practice). Aggregate weighted average per category.
- Define pass/fail thresholds: >4.5 = Preferred, 3.5–4.5 = Acceptable with mitigations, <3.5 = High risk.
Weighting rationale
- Security & Compliance highest because financial services are regulated and breach impact is critical.
- Global resiliency and platform maturity drive availability and long-term operability.
- SLAs and lock-in get lower weight numerically but are decisive in negotiation and migration planning.
Deliverable
A spreadsheet with weighted scoring, evidence links, mitigations per low score, and a recommended vendor with an implementation risk register.
