Enterprises no longer trust vendors’ claims, SLAs, or certifications. The market is shifting from price negotiation to continuous forensic verification.
SLA-based trust is dead. 63% of enterprise failures now stem from "certified" vendors passing paper audits but failing telemetry checks.
Shadow dependencies cost the Global 2000 over $42B in 2024. The risk has moved from the contract to the runtime.
Forensic Procurement: A shift from annual audits to real-time performance telemetry and penalty-backed code validation.
For two decades, procurement relied on the "SLA Shield"—the belief that ISO certifications and SOC2 reports equaled safety. Our investigation proves this is a fallacy.
By aggregating telemetry from 500+ enterprise deployments, we measured the delta between what vendors claim in contracts (Paper Compliance) and what they deliver in high-stress scenarios (Forensic Reality). The gap is widening, particularly in critical infrastructure.
Interact with the chart to see how "Data Governance" and "Uptime" show the largest discrepancies. This is where regulatory fines are born.
Source: COI Forensic Telemetry Dataset 2024
We normalized data from 1,200+ vendor incidents to build a taxonomy of failure. The data reveals a shift: failures are no longer just "outages"—they are complex, cascading logic errors and data leaks that traditional monitoring misses.
X: Detection Time (Hours) | Y: Severity Score | Size: Financial Impact
Intensity indicates probability of unrecoverable failure.
Data normalized from COI Vendor Incident Database (2023-2025).
Does "forensic procurement" cost more? Upfront, yes. But our "Cost-to-Value Waterfall" analysis demonstrates that the reduction in hidden operational costs and regulatory fines creates a net positive ROI within 14 months.
The Rule: Never sign a SaaS contract without a defined data exit path that does not require vendor support tickets.
Why it matters: 40% of vendors hold data hostage during disputes. A technical "kill switch" ensures you can extract keys and data programmatically.