EAB Reduces Manual Work, Speeds Customer Requests, and Elevates Trust with Drata
Challenge
- EAB's security team spent countless hours manually completing questionnaires and maintaining fragmented documentation across PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets.
- Managing third-party risk and customer assurance requests had become inefficient and time consuming.
- Sensitive security information needed to be shared with transparency, but without adding risk or internal friction.
“Before Trust Center, my team was spending a lot of time manually filling out questionnaires. It was incredibly time consuming and frustrating.”
Solution
- Implemented Trust Center to centralize and automate customer assurance workflows.
- Published a public-facing Trust Center that allows customers to access, subscribe to, and receive updates on EAB’s security posture.
- Enhanced visibility for sales and security teams to collaborate on incoming customer trust requests.
“The fact that you can just type in trust.eab.com and the Trust Center loads up — it’s part of our experience. Customers can subscribe and stay informed automatically.”
Impact Highlights
85% reduction in Questionnaire Requests EAB’s team dramatically reduced hours spent on manual questionnaires in 2025 increasing operational efficiency.
85% reduction in time to complete a security assessment. Requests for security information that once delayed deals can now be fulfilled instantly through the Trust Center, keeping commercial teams moving fast.
$20M Trust Center Influenced Revenue
Background
EAB partners with education institutions across the globe to improve education and thereby strengthening communities across the nation and around the globe. With sensitive academic and institutional data at the core of its mission, trust is essential to every partnership.
As the company expanded its technology offerings and moved into new markets, EAB’s security team faced a growing challenge: how to maintain transparency and responsiveness at scale. Every new customer engagement brought a wave of security questionnaires, audit requests, and due diligence checks — each with different formats, requirements, and delivery timelines.
These processes relied heavily on manual effort. The Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) team had to track dozens of versions of the same answers across PDFs and spreadsheets, often sending questionnaires, network diagrams, and other sensitive internal documentation through email. This created inefficiencies, introduced version control risks, and slowed both internal operations and external responses.
EAB recognized that maintaining customer trust required more than compliance, it demanded a modern, automated approach to how trust itself was communicated. They saw the opportunity to set a standard as to how trust was built and maintained between education technology companies and institutions to make it easier for higher ed security teams to complete their assessments. The team began searching for a solution that could centralize evidence, automate updates, and make transparency not just possible, but scalable.
“Drata was one of the first companies I’d heard actually talking about trust — not just security. That was exactly the way we wanted to talk about our products with customers.”
Modernizing Customer Assurance Workflows
Before adopting SafeBase Trust Center by Drata, EAB’s customer assurance workflow relied on manually filling out repetitive questionnaires, tracking evidence in shared drives, and emailing sensitive files back and forth. Each request required new formatting, multiple stakeholder reviews, and countless hours of administrative effort. “You get to a point where you can’t ask more of your people. You need to give them tools in order to be better at their jobs. And we felt like Drata was the right tool for this job,” shared Brian Markham, CISO of EAB.
SafeBase Trust Center by Drata changed that completely. By consolidating all of EAB’s security documentation, penetration test summaries, and compliance statements into a single, branded trust portal, the team established a single source of truth. The Trust Center became not only a home for policies and reports but also an intuitive customer facing experience that aligned with EAB’s commitment to openness and partnership.
The process of building internal alignment was equally transformational. Publishing a public Trust Center initially raised understandable concerns about exposure and information sensitivity. Brian and his team led a thoughtful change management effort, helping executives and technical staff understand that transparency was not a risk, it was a differentiator.
Once the Trust Center went live, feedback was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. “It’s a joy to get emails from customers saying our Trust Center is so cool. That’s not something you usually hear about a security tool.”
Customers appreciated the ability to review EAB’s security posture without delay, and internal teams saw the measurable benefits of automation. The initiative reframed how security was perceived across the company, shifting from a “necessary compliance function” to a strategic trust enabler.
“EAB’s GRC team demonstrated measurable efficiency gains, reducing the hours spent on questionnaires by a significant margin, data that leadership now tracks as a KPI for operational excellence.”
Accelerating Deals Through Automation
Before SafeBase Trust Center by Drata, EAB’s security team often received urgent requests for security information right when a deal was about to close. These last minute questionnaires created pressure on both security and sales, who needed answers fast to keep momentum. The team frequently had to scramble to gather documents and respond under tight deadlines.
With SafeBase Trust Center by Drata, that dynamic changed overnight. Instead of racing to assemble materials, the team can now point customers directly to the Trust Center, where validated, up to date information is already available. This makes it easy to respond quickly and confidently, even when requests arrive late in the process.
Trust Center removes the friction that once slowed these critical moments, giving both teams a simpler and faster path to delivering the information customers request.
“Sometimes requests come at the last minute. With Trust Center, the answer is simple, we can get it done fast.”
Enhanced Governance and Transparency with Drata Integration
When Drata and SafeBase Trust Center (now simply Trust Center) came together, EAB immediately saw the potential to extend its trust first strategy into a fully connected compliance ecosystem. The integration brought not just transparency, but structure and automation to EAB’s internal control environment. With Drata, the team can now upload control evidence directly within the platform, giving themselves immediate credit for completed control activities and eliminating manual tracking across documents and systems. This evidence then feeds into Drata’s continuous monitoring capabilities, which pull real time signals from the tools EAB already uses to maintain compliance. Every update flows seamlessly into SafeBase Trust Center by Drata, ensuring customers always see the most current and accurate information.
Drata’s integrations closed a critical gap for EAB by making continuous monitoring operationally feasible. Instead of verifying compliance point in time, the team benefits from ongoing, automated validation of controls, reducing effort and strengthening accuracy with each cycle. This creates a steady pipeline of verified security data that SafeBase Trust Center by Drata can surface proactively to customers.
“The features that Drata brought to the table that really drew us in were our ability to specifically meet control requirements right in the platform. We can upload data and evidence to give ourselves credit for performing a control effectively.”
Looking to the future, EAB views this Drata - SafeBase Trust Center connection as a foundation for continuous trust. With both systems centered on transparency and automation, the organization is well positioned to deepen its leadership in trust across the education technology sector.
“Drata and Trust Center together make a ton of sense because all care deeply about trust. The two systems can work together so customers always have the most up to date information.”
Empowering Teams and Strengthening Trust at Scale
Through SafeBase Trust Center by Drata, EAB transformed how its security and commercial teams build and communicate trust. What was once a manual, reactive process is now centralized and automated, giving customers real time access to the information they need while dramatically reducing internal effort. The GRC team has realized measurable time savings on questionnaires and evidence requests, while sales cycles move faster thanks to instant transparency. Today, security is not just a support function but a strategic advantage: unifying visibility across teams, strengthening customer confidence, and reinforcing EAB’s reputation as a partner that leads with trust.
“Since moving to Trust Center, the results have been night and day. We’ve been able to quantitatively show the difference in hours saved to our leadership.”
Future Outlook
EAB continues to expand its use of Drata’s SafeBase Trust Center by Drata Trust Center, with an eye toward deeper automation and seamless integration between compliance and trust workflows. The organization sees transparency not as a checkbox, but as a continuous promise — one strengthened by technology that scales with their mission.
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Navigate to new worlds of trust with Drata.
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Navigate to new worlds of trust with Drata.