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CRISC Practice Question: A company uses a third-party SaaS application for…
A company uses a third-party SaaS application for payroll processing. What is the most important activity to identify IT risks associated with this service?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse risk identification activities (like vendor assessments) with risk mitigation controls (like MFA) or contractual reviews (like SLAs), leading them to select a control or document review instead of the foundational assessment needed to uncover risks.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Conducting a vendor risk assessment
A vendor risk assessment is the most important activity because it systematically evaluates the third-party SaaS provider's security controls, compliance posture, and operational resilience before and during service use. For a payroll SaaS, this includes reviewing data protection measures for sensitive employee PII, understanding the provider's SOC 2 Type II report, and assessing their incident response capabilities. Without this assessment, the organization cannot identify inherent risks like unauthorized data access, service downtime, or regulatory non-compliance specific to the third-party environment.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Conducting a vendor risk assessment
Why this is correct
Vendor risk assessment systematically identifies and evaluates risks from third-party services.
- ✗
Performing penetration testing on the SaaS application
Why it's wrong here
Penetration testing is often not allowed by SaaS providers and may violate terms.
- ✗
Reviewing the service-level agreement (SLA)
Why it's wrong here
SLA review is part of vendor management but does not directly identify risks; it sets expectations.
- ✗
Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Why it's wrong here
MFA is a control to mitigate risk, not a method to identify risks.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CRISC practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CRISC exam.