As your organization onboards more and more vendors, supply chain risk increases exponentially.
To mitigate vendor risk, you must assess each vendor’s security posture – during onboarding and for the relationship lifecycle. But it’s a time-consuming and manual process that is hard to scale across your vendor ecosystem.
You need a way to secure your digital supply chain without overburdening security and risk management teams and impeding business success.
You can accomplish this in three ways:
1. Automate the vendor onboarding and assessment process
To get the best use of your security program resources, look for ways to automate manual processes during vendor onboarding and vendor risk assessments.
For instance, the traditional security questionnaire process is ideal for automation. Keeping track of questionnaires and responses involves checking email, spreadsheets, and calendar entries – which takes time and is also error-prone. Communicating via email or cloud-hosted links can also expose sensitive information about your business and vendors.
But, you can quickly and confidently assess digital supply chain security and streamline vendor onboarding using automated technology, like Bitsight Vendor Risk Management (VRM).
Bitsight VRM automates the information-gathering and assessment process in a secure, centralized platform. Risk assessment workflows can also be used to ensure that your most crucial vendors are compliant with regulatory standards and frameworks.
Plus, Bitsight VRM layers in independent validation to automatically detect red flags in your vendor’s responses.
2. Continuously monitor your extended ecosystem
Traditional security assessments only capture a point-in-time view of your vendors’ security postures and don’t account for evolving risk. But with Bitsight, you can keep an eye on emerging risks or cyber incidents across the digital supply chain – even fourth parties.
Bitsight’s continuous monitoring technology proactively identifies new vulnerabilities and threats and alerts you in near real-time when a vendor’s security posture changes. With this insight, you can move quickly to mitigate the risk of a breach through a connected vendor. You can even share your findings with a vendor, making remediation more collaborative and expedited.
In addition, continuous monitoring improves your ability to report on supply chain cyber risk to the board of directors and C-suite. With automation, you can quickly and easily create dashboard reports that display supply chain risk trends, performance improvements, and the likelihood of a vendor experiencing a future breach.
3. Mature your digital supply chain security
Working with limited resources and headcount? Augment and accelerate the maturity of your digital supply chain security program with the help of a dedicated advisor. An advisor can:
- Assume ownership of your VRM and remediation efforts in combination with the Bitsight platform.
- Validate each vendor’s security posture as part of RFIs and RFPs.
- Ensure that all new vendors have healthy cybersecurity postures and are remediating any known vulnerabilities.
- Manage your program’s vendor assessment and questionnaire process.
- Monitor alert activity and remediate observed vulnerabilities in partnership with vendors.
- Provide custom reports on program performance, overall risk posture, fluctuations, and risk trends.
Learn more about Bitsight Professional Services.
Bitsight can automate and scale your digital supply chain security program
Whether you're just getting started or taking your VRM program to the next level, don’t let the size of your organization or vendor ecosystem get in the way of identifying, quantifying, and reducing cyber risk. We provide you with the tools and services you need to solve complex cyber risk challenges – automatically and at scale.