5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Third-Party Risk

From lawyers, to marketing agencies, to office supply providers, your organization relies on third parties to keep the business in business. While critical to continued success, every vendor introduces risk to your organization.

Multiply that risk by 583 (the number of vendors the average company shares confidential information with), and it’s easy to see why third-party risk teams have their hands full. Growing regulatory mandates, a surging skills shortage, ineffectual procurement and vendor assessment practices, and dangerous visibility gaps create a perfect storm for security issues stemming from supply chains.

To tackle these challenges, third-party risk management teams need a way to understand, monitor, measure, and reduce their organization’s real-time exposure to third-party risk. They also need to take a critical look at their current exposure, coverage, and controls in order to chart their path forward. This begins with asking some tough — but important — questions, such as, Which vendors are most critical to my organization?” And, “If I bring this vendor on board, what are we legally accountable for if there’s a breach?”

Benefits of Elite Third-Party Intelligence

Positioning security intelligence at the core of your third-party risk mitigation strategy enables you to track dynamic changes to your vendors’ risk profiles, understand which relationships are the riskiest, and prioritize efforts to amplify impact.

Elite third-party intelligence from Recorded Future enables teams across your organization to address the many security challenges that third-party relationships present to the business, including:

• Understanding which third parties matter most to your business enables vulnerability management teams to prioritize patching and application control to safeguard the systems and software that you rely on from critical vendors.

• Vendor data leaks represent a potentially huge cost to your organization — both financially and in terms of reputational damage. Protect your brand by continuously monitoring risk levels of critical third parties and enabling real-time alerts throughout the lifecycle of those relationships.

• Real-time intelligence on threats targeting your third parties or their applications empowers your incident response team to respond fast and block attacks.

• Contextualized threat intelligence on partners that are being targeted in the wild or discussed on the dark web, along with insights into attackers’ motivations and capabilities, enables the entire security organization to optimize workflows and amplify their impact.

• As geopolitical landscapes rapidly evolve, your vendors are often exposed to new risks. Protect your assets by accelerating critical decision-making with real-time, contextual intelligence on relevant geopolitical threats and trends impacting your vendors.

Use this short e-book to explore five critical questions about your approach to third-party risk. Answering each question honestly is your first step to effectively defend your organization against the weakest links in your supply chain. Download the e-book now to close your visibility gap and reduce risk to your organization.