Developing A Third-Party Cyber Security Risk Management Process
As companies in all sectors bring on new vendors at an accelerating pace, third-party cyber risk management has become more important than ever. Yet with shrinking budgets and smaller headcounts, third-party risk management teams are under extraordinary pressure to onboard vendors faster and with less expense.
The third-party cyber security risk management process is complex and full of difficult decisions. Without an efficient, effective process, managing the onboarding and assessment of hundreds or thousands of vendors can be overwhelming and won’t be done to properly protect your network from cybersecurity risks.
That’s where Bitsight can help. With a suite of technologies built on an industry-leading Security Ratings Service, Bitsight enables your teams to streamline the cyber security risk management process to better mitigate risk to scale your vendor onboarding process to match your organization’s third party risk management needs.
Making Your Risk Management Process More Efficient
Creating a more efficient and scalable cyber security risk management process requires attention to three areas of your risk management program.
Security program policies
The key to onboarding vendors quickly while mitigating risk is to have the right policies in place for the entire vendor lifecycle. For example:v
- Establishing policies around accepted risk thresholds can help to streamline onboarding by winnowing out vendors that don’t meet your security requirements before you spend time fully assessing and onboarding them.
- Collaborating with procurement, legal, compliance, and financial departments will help to make sure that policies accurately reflect the goals of everyone in the organization, and that they are universally agreed on up front.
- Using security ratings can help to streamline vendor onboarding by getting an initial look into a potential vendor’s cybersecurity hygiene, allowing security managers to prioritize the most secure vendors and eliminate non-conforming vendors before they go through an in-depth and time-consuming security assessment.
- Policies that trigger reassessment based on a change in security posture can help to reduce the amount of work in the assessment phases of a third-party risk management program and avoid letting risks linger in your network between auditing cycles.
The reassessment process
- To streamline the reassessment process, many companies are shifting from a standardized approach that treats all vendors equally and asks everyone the same questions, to a tiered approach that manages reassessment based on the risk each vendor poses to the organization. Vendors working closely with business operations and sensitive data will belong to a more critical top tier, while vendors who pose less inherent risk will reside in a lower tier. By spending more time and effort reassessing top-tier vendors and less time with lower tier vendors, your risk management team can save time on the cyber security risk management process while mitigating risk more effectively.
- Choosing continuous monitoring technology rather than yearly or periodic assessments can provide you with immediate alerts when a vendor’s security posture changes. This information can automatically trigger reassessment if the change is concerning.
Communication with the board and executive leadership
- Sharing your cyber security risk management process and findings with your executive leadership and board provides the information they need to make budget decisions and provide educated oversight. Demonstrating success of your cyber risk management framework can help encourage continued support for your efforts. Communicating with this diverse group of leaders requires metrics that make sense to individuals who may not be deeply versed in cybersecurity jargon, along with context that help prioritize the risk associated with each metric.
