It might sound confusing at first, but knowing who your third parties also rely on for their day-to-day business operations is key to building out a smarter and more informed vendor risk management program. Commonly known as fourth-party concentration risk, the ability to determine the fourth-party vendors in your digital supply chain that serve a majority of your third-party vendors can help organizations avoid potentially catastrophic supply chain risk from such a dependency.
For example, say 70% of your third-party vendors use one of your fourth-party vendors. If that fourth-party vendor is subject to a cyber-attack or breach, that one fourth-party vendor can now potentially expose 70% of your third parties to vulnerabilities and in turn affect your own organization’s risk.
Recognizing your ever-growing network of third- and fourth-party vendors, not to mention your fourth-party concentration risk, can be challenging. According to a Gartner report, 60% of organizations work with more than 1,000 third parties. Identifying the vendor ecosystem by traditional manual means is becoming impossible to manage. Automatically detecting the vendors you and your third parties work with will become critical as your vendor ecosystem grows.
SecurityScorecard’s Automatic Vendor Detection (AVD), helps automate that process by instantly giving you a view of your entire third and fourth-party ecosystem, enabling you to visualize known and unknown vendors, and take proactive steps to mitigate risk. And to go a level deeper, organizations can also prioritize their fourth party concentration risk by filtering by the number of shared connections between their fourth and third parties.
To go a step further, SecurityScorecard’s Automatic Vendor Detection with Enhanced Illumination enables organizations not only a wider breadth of signals to identify third and fourth-party vendors, but the products they use as well, helping them reduce zero-day response scope at the most critical of times.
DISCOVER UNKNOWN VENDORS Automatically detect known and unknown vendors in your digital supply chain. DISCOVER PRODUCTS IN USE BY VENDORS Illuminate the products of your 3rd, 4th, and “nth” party vendors SEARCH FOR SPECIFIC ISSUES ACROSS VENDORS Search across a portfolio of vendors for potential issues like recent breaches or ransomware related issues. REDUCE ZERO DAY RESPONSE SCOPE Find and rule-out vendors with vulnerabilities and reduce zero-day third party response scope. UNCOVER FOURTH PARTY VENDOR CONCENTRATION RISK Identify fourth party vendors in your supply chain that serve a majority of your third parties to assess potentially catastrophic supply chain risk from such dependency. |
Please visit our AVD info page for more information on how SecurityScorecard can help your organization detect your third and fourth party vendors.