Third-party risk management is a well-known industry term that emphasizes the importance of looking outside yourself to identify potential risks to your organization.
In the current business landscape, where you are communicating and collaborating with dozens, if not hundreds, of other organizations, focusing on your own cyber risk and that of your third parties is not enough.
It’s very easy for organizations to focus on what’s directly in front of them, such as the third parties they communicate with. But it’s also necessary to zoom out and understand how supply chain risks don’t just stop with your third parties.
What is business ecosystem cyber risk management?
Business ecosystem cyber risk management isn’t a series of actions. It’s a necessary approach that maximizes your cybersecurity posture by including everyone involved with your organization. But how do you manage risk when there are so many entities at play, some of whom you don’t even know exist?
SecurityScorecard offers several tools that provide an automated way to discover and manage all entities within your business ecosystem, including third, fourth, fifth parties and beyond.
With Automatic Vendor Detection, organizations can rapidly surface critical vulnerabilities from their third- and fourth- parties and the products they use, revealing their entire digital supply chain and the risks they pose to their organization.
Business ecosystem risk management checklist
CISOs have several options when managing business ecosystem risk:
Tighten up the supply chain
Managing contracts and compliance requirements is a good place to start. Organizations must establish clear guidelines on due diligence before signing contracts. This includes a more controlled and restricted access to data for third parties. Organizations must ensure their partners meet and are dedicated to meeting their cybersecurity standards.
One way to do so is through automated risk assessments. By adding automation into the equation, organizations can fully leverage the insights gained from vendor risk assessments without dedicating extensive time and resources to the process.
Automated vendor risk assessments allow you to gain visibility into every questionnaire and response completion, helping mature security programs and vendor relationships. With SecurityScorecard Assessments, spend 83% less time onboarding and validating vendor compliance to industry frameworks. Our automated verification of questionnaire responses map back to cyber risk intelligence, allowing organizations to trust but verify their third parties.
Cross-industry cooperation
CISOs can’t solve their problems alone. There needs to be strong collaboration across industries and across sectors to allow data-sharing and coordination at an international level, with more emphasis on key cyber threats instead of trend analysis.
You can learn more about how to optimize and automate your business ecosystem risk management program by watching this short video featuring SecurityScorecard Co-Founder and COO Sam Kassoumeh:
Business ecosystem risk management with SecurityScorecard
SecurityScorecard gives you a complete view of your vendor ecosystem, each vendor’s security posture, and a private Supply Chain Risk Score to understand the security posture of your entire ecosystem.
Understand the risk posed to your ecosystem with a single Supply Chain Risk Score.
- Visualize your full vendor ecosystem: gain a ubiquitous view of cyber risk with unparalleled graphics giving you a full view of your ecosystem risk.
- Drive targeted discussions with your supply chain: pinpoint related risks and specific vulnerabilities within every vendor, so you can partner with your third parties to accelerate risk mitigation.
- Streamline vendor risk management workflows: simplify mitigation and quickly identify threat exposures with a single dashboard highlighting areas of strength and weakness across the full spectrum of vendors–including your fourth-party vendors.
Your security posture is never just your security posture. It’s a combination of yours, your vendors, and their vendors that make up your entire ecosystem.
To start gaining visibility into your business ecosystem risk, sign up for a free account today!
