You sent a cybersecurity assessment to your third parties, what’s next?
With more organizations working from home and new vendors being brought on to support this transition, assessing the cyber risk posed by your third parties is critical. As virtual risk assessments become the norm, integrating cybersecurity assessment data into your business workflows is key.
SecurityScorecard Ratings provides the most up to date security ratings for over 1.5 million organizations, enabling third party risk management teams to prioritize their vendors. Atlas, our cybersecurity questionnaire exchange and validation solution, is leveraged by users to send assessments to vendors, track the status of each one, and instantly validate responses with SecurityScorecard data. Together, SecurityScorecard Ratings and Atlas cut through the questionnaire noise by providing a true 360° view of risk. Augmenting vendor-provided evidence with external security ratings helps you make confident decisions about risk.
SecurityScorecard’s Atlas API allows you to build custom workflows and integrate Atlas’ cybersecurity assessment data into your existing third-party risk management processes. With a powerful, convenient, and simple way to interact with Atlas and SecurityScorecard Ratings data, here are 5 ways your team can start leveraging the Atlas API.
1) Automatically send a cybersecurity assessment through Atlas
Are you onboarding a new vendor or recently saw an event that requires a new assessment? Leverage the Atlas API to send a questionnaire from your template library or use one of our 25+ industry standard frameworks — such as an ISO or NIST — without logging into the platform. Specify the due date, customize the email body, and set automatic reminders, so you never have to follow up with your third parties on the status of an assessment.
2) Stay on top of the status of every assessment
We’re all busy. Sometimes third parties disappear after an assessment is sent. Traditionally, this means you have to make notes during the assessment and plan to follow up with each vendor. Atlas’ API enables your team to get the status of any sent questionnaire, download responses, and review the attached evidence from your vendors’ cybersecurity assessments. Once these responses are downloaded, your team will have the most up to date information at your fingertips, saving you time from digging through messy emails and folders. Leverage this data to build your own reports and dashboards in your business intelligence tools, in addition to Atlas’ out-of-the-box reports.
3) Trust but verify with SecurityScorecard Ratings validation
Cybersecurity questionnaires are long and can take time. Security teams are overwhelmed with providing responses to every vendor and ensuring that they satisfy their requirements. Once a questionnaire is received, it’s up to your team to prioritize, review, and identify risks. Atlas’ instant validation with SecurityScorecard Ratings automatically map to individual questions which enables you to prioritize, trust, and verify your vendors’ responses. Now, you can tap into this wealth of cybersecurity data through the API, giving you a 360° view of risk.
4) Understand how your team is collaborating
Third-party risk management is a team sport. It requires collaboration with every unit within your organization that onboards new vendors. Likewise, cybersecurity assessments require all hands on deck. Whether you’re assessing third parties or responding to questionnaires, Atlas already offers multiple tools that streamline collaboration. Atlas’ API gives you access to information about your organizations’ Atlas users, helping you understand how to most efficiently assign tasks and collaborate within your organization.
5) Access responses and attachments from all of your vendors
With multiple vendors and assessments, inboxes can quickly clog up and folders get messy. So, finding the information you need can be challenging. Whether you need to access a vendors’ last assessment or a specific attachment, you can now leverage Atlas’ API to pull this key information in an organized way.
Find out how your organization can benefit from SecurityScorecard’s APIs
Monitoring third-party cybersecurity risk is a resource-intensive task that requires continuous visibility into your vendor ecosystem. SecurityScorecard’s platform enables vendor risk management teams to accelerate the risk assessment process by 75%. Our robust APIs with easy-to-use documentation are leveraged by teams to embed SecurityScorecard Ratings and Atlas cybersecurity data into their daily workflows.
Security Ratings help to optimize this process by providing you with valuable insights into your vendors’ security posture. Security Ratings help you identify where improvements can be made within your vendor ecosystem and prioritize vendor assessments so that you can stay ahead of threat actors. SecurityScorecard Atlas is the cybersecurity questionnaire exchange and validation solution and the only platform that instantly maps cybersecurity rating data to individual responses, providing a true 360° view of risk.
With third-party vendors becoming increasingly important to business success, integrating third-party risk as an enterprise-wide strategy is key. SecurityScorecard provides organizations access to essential cybersecurity data they need to proactively identify and mitigate vendor risk.
