If there’s one thing we’ve all learned, it’s that supply chain attacks are not going away anytime soon. Last year, we saw major cyber incidents involving Accellion, Kaseya, Codecov and others; next year, there will certainly be more.
To help prevent and respond to similar cyber incidents, it’s essential to consider how best to reduce third-party risk. How can this be accomplished? Here are five resolutions to help you make 2022 a more secure year.
1. Assess your suppliers
Clearly, it’s important to understand your suppliers’ cyber risk, but not everyone agrees on the best way to achieve that. External assessments might be a good place to start, but they don’t consider a third party’s internal policies or security posture. Security questionnaires are important, but they only provide a snapshot of a moment in time.
The most comprehensive supplier assessment considers both. It should include an external attack surface assessment, combined with automated, customizable security questionnaires while considering business context. Such a thorough evaluation provides you with the most visibility into your suppliers’ cyber risk.
2. Say goodbye to spreadsheets
If you are still using spreadsheets for your security questionnaires, it’s time to think about automation. Manual questionnaires can be slow, laborious and ineffective, and they don’t allow for scalability. It’s not surprising, therefore, that everyone seems to hate them.
Using automated, dynamic questionnaires can be a game-changer, allowing you to receive responses more quickly and onboard vendors faster. You can also choose a standard template questionnaire or customize your own.
3. Consider business context
Not all cyber risk is the same, but it’s not always easy to contextualize risk according to the business relationship. For example, a third party that supplies paper should not be rated the same way as one that connects to your email systems. Knowing the context of the business relationship allows you to prioritize efforts correctly to manage risk appropriately.
4. Continuously monitor
Cyber risk is never static, and so a point-in-time assessment is essentially outdated the moment it’s completed. Meanwhile, new vulnerabilities, breaches and security changes can alter the landscape considerably. For these reasons, it’s important to continuously monitor and evaluate your suppliers. In doing so, you gain ongoing visibility and better control over third-party risk.
5. Communicate with stakeholders
Third-party cyber risk management typically involves several parties, including, at a minimum, the business owner and the vendor. Business owners want vendors to quickly deliver documentation and proof of security, but vendors might lack the security knowhow to respond promptly. The constant back-and-forth can impede business, and without effective collaboration, business relationships suffer. That’s why it’s so important to have an efficient way for stakeholders to communicate with each other, ideally by using one platform for engagement between all teams.
Subscribe to Our Blog
How Panorays Helps
Panorays combines automated, dynamic security questionnaires with external attack surface assessments and business context to provide organizations with a rapid, accurate view of supplier cyber risk. With Panorays, you can dramatically speed up your third-party security evaluation process, streamline collaboration and remediation between teams and suppliers, eliminate manual questionnaires, gain continuous visibility and build trust within business relationships.
Want to learn more about how Panorays can help you keep these New Year’s resolutions? Request a demo today.
