When you choose to work with a third party, there’s always the risk that they will cause your business harm. The right tools can help you make better-informed decisions about the vendors you choose and spot problems before they occur.
Third-party vendors are an important part of any business, but it’s important for employers to understand what the risks are when working with these partners. Many companies enter vendor relationships without knowing the cybersecurity health of their vendor partners yet, industry experts estimate that about 60 percent of all data breaches happen via third-party vendors.
Our current business climate requires organizational leaders to adequately assess and govern their cybersecurity risk while also understanding the vulnerabilities posed to their organization so that they can be addressed in a timely manner.
Understanding your third-party risk
Making sure your third-party vendor is trustworthy before signing them up for a project or contract is an important first step in making sure your organization stays out of harm’s way. By assessing the risk of their cybersecurity health and checking their background and reputation, you can feel more confident when providing them access to sensitive data or proprietary information about yourself and others inside or outside of your organization.
In a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, 66 percent of companies surveyed had no idea how many third-party relationships they had or how they were managed, despite 61 percent of companies in the same survey reporting having a breach attributable to a third party.
How to protect your business
In order to protect your business, you’ll need to create a list of all the vendors you work with. Next, find out what they do for your company and whether or not they have a cyber policy in place. If so, ask them to share it with you. You should also invite them to join SecurityScorecard so you can collaborate with them to maintain or improve their cybersecurity practices based on the expectations set by your organization.
While the possibility of cyber attacks from third-party vendors is uncertain, the good news is that there are ways to mitigate your risk. You can start by implementing strong security practices in your own business and then working with your vendors to ensure they follow suit.
SecurityScorecard helps organizations better understand their risk and prioritize issues to ensure cybersecurity expectations are met. Now, that it’s even easier to create an account using Single-Sign On and log-in and it’s even easier to assess the risk your vendors pose to your organization.
With SecurityScorecard, you can:
Invite your team members and vendors to join SecurityScorecard for free to help uncover the risk posed to the organization.
Understand your risk
Gain a deep understanding of your cybersecurity posture and highlight the issues that impact your rating by logging into your SecurityScorecard account.Know the risk posed by each vendor AND your entire ecosystem.
Gain ongoing visibility into the overall security posture of each third and fourth-party vendor, enabling organizations to pinpoint their riskiest vendors and the specific issues that need to be resolved using Automatic Vendor Detection (AVD). In addition, AVD calculates a Supply Chain Risk Score by combining the risk of an organization and its entire digital supply chain. This takes into account multiple parameters, including infrastructure, paths to an organization, and how much risk each vendor can pose.Prioritize issues that impact your rating
Learn how specific issues impact your cybersecurity health and automatically generate a recommended plan of issues to remediate to achieve a target letter grade using Score Planner. If the recommendations do not fully meet your company’s security priorities, the plan can be customized or easily recreated using SecurityScorecard’s simple user interface.
With the new Single Sign-On capability, you can log into your account quickly and invite your vendors to do the same so they can take action quickly.