Managing the security risk that is introduced by your vendors, third parties, and other suppliers is hard enough as it is. Without the proper tools in place, protecting your organization can seem daunting and overwhelming. In this article, we point to emails, questionnaires, and spreadsheets as the primary culprits that can hinder successful management of security risk caused by vendors, third parties, and suppliers, and look for solutions that result in simplified, centralized, and organized vendor risk management.
Email is a thing of the past
Trying to manage security risk by email is impossible, yet you would be surprised at how many organizations still try to manage this process by email. Companies will email vendors asking for things, vendors will send assets and other attachments back, and there will be follow up and clarifying questions sent back to the vendor, who will then send responses and additional collateral back. All of this is done by email, which means that it is repetitive, manual, cumbersome, and things end up getting lost in email attachments.
What if instead there was a way to centralize all of that? What if instead, there was a way to automate all of those follow-ups and all those check-ins, in one, central, repository?
Centralization is key to the success of managing security risk within your organization. By having all correspondence in one place, you eliminate overlap, lack of internal and external communication, and successfully integrate different groups into one that is working towards a common goal for your company. By centralizing outreach, gone are the days of lost attachments, delayed correspondence, and people being out of the loop.
Simply your questionnaires
When it comes to managing security risk that is introduced by vendors, third parties, and other suppliers, a critical component of any program involves security questionnaires. Security questionnaires make it easier for the enterprise or large companies working with these outside parties to collect, in a uniform manner, information about these parties that they work with. However, the problem is often approached as a one size fits all solution. That does not work because different vendors, suppliers, and third parties are different. They supply different things, they each have different levels of risk, and they each have different levels of access to things that are of varying levels of importance to the organization that is soliciting this information. As a result, it becomes a negative experience for the vendor, third party, or supplier.
How do you solve this problem?
Dynamic questionnaires. The idea behind dynamic questionnaires is that the vendor, third party, or supplier, self-identifies what they do for the organization. That expands or collapses certain parts of the overall questionnaire. So, instead of answering anywhere from 400-600 questions (many of which don’t apply), instead they are only answering less than half that are germane and relevant. That helps your vendor, third party, or supplier have a better experience, and only give you the information that you need, and it also helps you be able to more quickly narrow in on the information that matters based on the particular supplier, vendor, or third party that you are talking to.
Stay away from spreadsheets
We’ve established how hard it is to try and manage vendor risk. Imagine trying to manage the security risk for your entire organization through spreadsheets. Despite this being a chaotic method, that is how many organizations still try to gather and keep track of the collection of all of this important information they get from vendors.
The problem here is that there is not a single, centralized source of truth if you are trying to manage it with spreadsheets. The result is a spreadsheet of spreadsheets because each vendor has their own spreadsheet, and then you need a spreadsheet to manage all the spreadsheets that your organization has received. How do you gather all this information in a single, easy to use space?
You don’t
We recommend centralizing all information in one easy to access place through a vendor risk management and assessment tool. It is easy to access for the people that want to consume the information, and easy to access for the people that need to upload information. This results in a simpler to use, more streamlined, and more centralized process. When you can centralize a problem, it streamlines an otherwise bulky, complex, and cumbersome process.
Emails, spreadsheet, and complex questionnaires are a thing of the past. Whether you manage thousands of partners or a small team, organizing and automating your programs will help protect your company from third-party data breaches, uncover potential vendor risks, and accelerate remediation with clear steps. This allows you to stay in control, have a faster remediation flow, and minimize the chaos of vendor risk management.