Best Way to Allow 3rd Party Software Permissions to Scan RHEL systems

I'm dealing with some 3rd party software vendors who need to allow their software the ability to either traverse or ls on directories owned by Root.

I'm surprised that they don't have a much more secure way of doing this or they don't have a solution for me and that I have to figure it out.

I though one way would be to put them in the Root group, however I don't think this is secure. And I don't want to change default permissions on files and directories to allow their software to work.

I'm just wondering what others have done to get this to work.

thanks