Vendor Risk Monitoring

Securing the supply chain through vendor risk monitoring

Engaging third-party vendors is vital to organizations as they grow and scale operations. Vendor relationships enable companies to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and deliver better customer experiences. However, bringing vendors on board increases inherent risk, especially in cybersecurity. Some of the largest and most costly data breaches in history have resulted from vulnerabilities in a vendor’s software.

Traditional vendor risk management (VRM) solutions involve manual, time-intensive processes and can’t deliver visibility over a rapidly evolving third-party risk landscape. To securely grow the vendor base, organizations need modern solutions that can deliver continuous vendor risk monitoring.

That’s where Bitsight can help. Providing trusted data and insights that enable risk-based decision-making for the world’s leading companies, Bitsight provides a best-in-class vendor risk management solution for mitigating risk throughout the entire vendor lifecycle.

The challenges of vendor risk monitoring

Traditionally, vendor risk management programs have been limited by several obstacles.

Inefficient processes

Vendor risk monitoring for most companies involves manual, repetitive efforts that are highly time-and resource-intensive. Programs often rely on one-off spreadsheets, multiple follow-ups via email, and calendar reminders to trigger the next risk assessment. These manual processes are error-prone, limited in scope, and virtually impossible to scale.

Point-in-time evaluation

While vendor risk levels and security postures may change at any time, most VRM programs are based on point-in-time questionnaires that simply can’t address risks that arise between assessments.

Insufficient data

When self-reporting questionnaires are the primary sources of information, any errors, misunderstandings, or incomplete data from a vendor will prevent risk managers from accurately making data-driven decisions.

Inability to measure success

Traditional vendor risk monitoring programs don’t provide sufficient insight or analytics to measure performance, which makes it difficult to communicate their value to company leadership and the Board of Directors.

Lack of customization

Most vendor risk management programs are one-size-fits-all, offering no easy way to tier vendors or prioritize remediation. This prevents risk management teams from identifying the riskiest vendor relationships and requires vendors to comply with requirements that may be too stringent or too lenient.

Bitsight Vendor Risk Management

Bitsight transforms how organizations manage third-party risk and measure security performance. With a proven cybersecurity assessment tool that supports continuous monitoring, organizations can make faster, more strategic decisions about vendor risk and cybersecurity policy.

Bitsight Vendor Risk Management provides objective cyber risk analytics to help ensure that vendors are within your organization’s risk tolerance. Integrating seamlessly with existing third-party risk management processes, Bitsight’s vendor risk monitoring solution helps manage risk at every level – from procurement through the entire vendor relationship. With Bitsight’s technology, third-party risk management teams can adopt a customized approach to vendor due diligence and assessment that matches your organization’s risk tolerance and program maturity, combining workflow automation with objective data to meet cybersecurity requirements.

Vendor risk monitoring technology from Bitsight enables you to:

• Manage an expanding vendor ecosystem with greater confidence.
• Build productive vendor relationships based on trust.
• Concentrate time and resources on the most important parts of your vendor ecosystem.
• Easily scale your third-party ecosystem to meet the needs of your growing organization.
• Demonstrate the value of program performance for company stakeholders.

Benefits of vendor risk monitoring with Bitsight

Bitsight Vendor Risk Management delivers significant advantages over traditional manual processes that take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Conduct faster vendor assessments

In a cyber risk landscape that changes every day, it’s essential to have a vendor risk monitoring solution that empowers you to take a more strategic approach to risk assessments. Bitsight VRM automates the evaluation process to increase efficiency and prioritizes critical and high-risk vendor assessments with customized workflows. A network of 20,000+ vendor security profiles helps to accelerate insight, and vendor validation powered by Bitsight’s best-in-class security ratings inevitably results in better decision-making.

Manage vulnerabilities confidently

When a new risk or vulnerability is identified, Bitsight helps risk managers react confidently and respond in a scalable way across the entire supply chain. Bitsight VRM promotes effective collaboration with vendors impacted by vulnerabilities and supports custom questionnaire templates that enable tailored outreach and response.

Improve vendor risk decisions with a unified solution

Some organizations adopt multiple solutions for third-party risk management, vendor risk monitoring, and software supply chain security, making it difficult for risk professionals to prioritize efforts. Bitsight offers a comprehensive, fully integrated solution that spans all aspects of vendor risk management. Bitsight also provides objective evidence to support vendor response validation, allowing risk management teams to eliminate the guesswork and make more informed decisions faster.

Why customers trust Bitsight

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains. Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.