What is a Trust Center
A centralized, customer-facing hub where you publish and control your security and compliance documentation.
What is a Trust Center
A trust center is a centralized, customer-facing hub where you publish and control your security and compliance documentation. Instead of emailing PDFs, chasing down the security team, or digging through shared drives, buyers get one place to find everything they need to evaluate your security posture.
It replaces the old way of handling security reviews: scattered documents, email chains, and the dreaded "let me check with someone and get back to you."
Why trust centers exist
Security reviews used to be a back-office problem. A procurement team would send a questionnaire, your security person would fill it out, and everyone moved on. That worked when deals were smaller and buyers had fewer options.
Now, security is a sales problem.
Buyers research vendors before they ever talk to sales. They look for certifications, policies, and proof that you take security seriously. If they can't find your security posture, they'll find a competitor who makes theirs visible.
At the same time, regulatory pressure has increased. GDPR raised the bar for data protection transparency. NIS2 pushed supply chain security into the spotlight. Buyers — especially in Europe — now expect vendors to demonstrate compliance proactively, not just when asked.
The result: security teams are buried in repetitive requests, sales cycles stall waiting for documentation, and buyers get frustrated by slow responses. A trust center solves this by making your security posture accessible before anyone has to ask.
What a trust center should include
Not everything belongs on your trust center. The goal is to give buyers what they need at each stage of evaluation — without oversharing sensitive details too early.
The most effective trust centers use a layered access model:
| Layer | What's in it | Who sees it |
|---|---|---|
| Public profile | Certifications, compliance badges, security overview, high-level FAQs | Everyone — including search engines and AI tools |
| Restricted access | SLAs, DPAs, pentest summaries, subprocessor lists | Prospects actively evaluating you (typically after providing a business email) |
| NDA-protected | Architecture diagrams, detailed security controls, sensitive policies | Serious buyers who've signed an NDA |
This structure lets you be transparent without being reckless. Early-stage prospects get enough to qualify you. Serious buyers get the detail they need to close. And you maintain control over what gets shared with whom.
What makes a trust center actually work
Having a trust center isn't enough. Plenty of companies have a "Security" page buried in their footer that nobody uses. What separates a useful trust center from a checkbox exercise?
Self-serve access controls. Buyers shouldn't wait for your security team to manually grant access. The best trust centers let prospects request access, verify their business email, and get in — without a human bottleneck.
Custom domain. Your trust center should live at trust.yourcompany.com, not on some third-party URL. It's part of your brand, not a bolt-on.
Document controls. Watermarking, download tracking, expiration dates. You should know who accessed what, when, and be able to revoke access if needed.
Analytics. Which documents are prospects downloading? Where do they spend time? Where do deals stall? A trust center without analytics is just a fancy file cabinet.
AI-ready content. Here's what most vendors miss: your trust center isn't just for humans anymore. Buyers increasingly use AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, internal LLMs — to process vendor documentation. If your trust center content isn't structured for machine consumption, you're invisible to a growing slice of your buyers' research workflow.
How a trust center helps your business
A well-built trust center delivers measurable outcomes:
Deflect repetitive security requests. Buyers answer their own questions before asking yours. The standard questions — "Are you SOC 2 certified?", "Where's your DPA?", "Who are your subprocessors?" — get answered without pulling in your security team.
Shorten sales cycles. Security reviews that used to take weeks can happen in days. Buyers self-serve the documentation they need, and your team only gets involved for the edge cases.
Reduce security team load. Fewer ad-hoc requests means more time for actual security work. Your team stops being a document retrieval service.
Build trust at scale. One source of truth beats a hundred email threads. Every buyer sees the same, up-to-date information — and you have an audit trail of who saw what.
Here's how that breaks down by role:
| Role | What they get |
|---|---|
| Security | Fewer ad-hoc requests, one place to update documentation |
| Sales | A link to share instead of "let me check with security" |
| Legal | NDA workflows handled, audit trail for who accessed what |
| Marketing | A branded page they don't have to maintain |
Who needs a trust center?
Not every company needs one. But if any of these sound familiar, you probably do:
- You sell B2B software to enterprise or mid-market buyers
- You have compliance documentation that buyers ask about e.g. Pentest results, DPA, etc.
- Your security team spends hours each week answering the same questions
- You've lost deals — or had them delayed — because of slow security reviews
- You're tired of the "can you send us your security documentation?" email
If you're a two-person startup selling to other startups, you can probably get by with a Google Drive folder. If you're selling to companies with procurement teams and security reviews, a trust center pays for itself quickly.
What to look for in a trust center platform
If you're evaluating trust center software, here's what matters:
Layered access. Public, restricted, and NDA-gated tiers — not just "public or private."
Custom branding and domain. It should look like your site, not a generic portal.
Click-to-sign NDA workflows. Buyers shouldn't have to email legal to access sensitive docs.
Watermarking and download tracking. Know who has your documents and maintain an audit trail.
Analytics tied to your CRM. See which accounts are engaging with your trust center, not just anonymous traffic.
Data residency options. Especially for European buyers, knowing where your data lives matters. A trust center hosted in the EU, with minimal third-party dependencies, is increasingly a requirement — not a nice-to-have.
AI-ready architecture. Your content should be structured so AI tools can consume it effectively. This is the next frontier, and most platforms haven't caught up yet.
Build your trust center with Orbiq
We built Orbiq because we saw what European B2B teams were dealing with: US-based platforms with enterprise pricing, unclear data residency, and features that didn't match how security reviews actually work.
Orbiq gives you a fully branded trust center with three-tier access controls, click-to-sign NDAs, watermarking, and analytics — hosted in Europe, with transparent pricing.
No enterprise sales calls. No "contact us for pricing." Ready in 30 minutes.
FAQ
What's the difference between a trust center and a data room?
A data room is typically used for due diligence in M&A or fundraising — a temporary space for sensitive documents during a specific transaction. A trust center is a permanent, customer-facing hub for ongoing security and compliance documentation. Data rooms are project-based; trust centers are always-on.
Do I need a trust center if I'm already SOC 2 certified?
Having SOC 2 is great. But if buyers can't easily find and access your report, the certification loses half its value. A trust center makes your SOC 2 (and other certifications) visible and accessible — which is the whole point of getting certified in the first place.
Can a trust center replace security questionnaires?
Not entirely, but it can dramatically reduce them. When buyers can self-serve your certifications, policies, and common security answers, they often don't need to send a full questionnaire. And when they do, the questions are more targeted — because they've already found the basics themselves.
How is a trust center different from a security page on my website?
A security page is static marketing content. A trust center is interactive: it has access controls, document management, NDA workflows, and analytics. Think of a security page as a brochure; a trust center is a self-service portal.