A third party vendor is a person or company that provides services for another company (or that company’s customers).  While vendors are considered “third parties,” some industries differentiate a “third-party vendor” specifically as a vendor under written contract, but not all vendors work under a contract. For clarity’s sake, the term “third-party vendor” in this article refers to any individual...

If you’re like most organizations, you are highly dependent on third-party vendors to efficiently run your business. On the flip side, vendors present a level of risk that can have serious legal, financial and business repercussions, making vendor risk assessments more essential than ever. But how do you effectively manage hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors on a continuous basis?...

What is IT Vendor Risk Management (VRM)? Think about all of your organization’s third-party vendor relationships. Of course you have physical vendors that handle mail, deliver supplies, clean your offices and provide maintenance, etc. These vendors have some access to your organization’s private information and you need to take the necessary steps to protect your information from falling into the...

Vendor risk management includes various potential risks that your company may face when doing business with third-party vendors, including financial, operational, reputational and regulatory. As technology and communications allow businesses to expand their supply chains, the complexity of vendor risk management increases. Your business is likely working with more vendors than ever before, and each of those vendors is going...

What Vendor Due Diligence Is and Why You Need To Do It It is almost impossible today to do business without contracting with vendors or third parties. Third-party vendors are any persons or businesses that provide you with a product or service. And when you do business with a third party, you take on any cybersecurity risks that that vendor...

Why Is Vendor Risk Management Important? You‘ve taken all the necessary steps to protect your data and systems from cyberattacks. That’s good. But it’s not enough. Today more than ever you also have to be concerned about security in all of your third parties, like contractors, consultants, vendors and suppliers, that you rely on to create, produce and deliver your...

If you’re like most companies, you want to do business with vendors because they simplify your life. That is, unless your vendors are breached. Then they complicate, and may even threaten, your business. Why does this happen? And what, if anything, can you do to prevent this from happening? What does your vendors’ security have to do with you? When...

Now, more than ever, managing third-party security risk is critical. And one of the ways to manage this type of third-party risk is through vendor security questionnaires. That being said, third-party vendors notoriously hate questionnaires. They complain incessantly about needing to answer tens, if not hundreds, of security questions. They are especially frustrated if the questions being asked are not...

It is no secret that there is a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals. Couple that with COVID, remote and hybrid working, and a rise in security breaches and you’ve got a lot of stressed, overburdened professionals looking for effective solutions to make their jobs easier. Sound familiar? If this resonates with you, it’s fair to say that automating your third-party...

As organizations increasingly rely on third-party vendors to provide essential services, they also become more vulnerable to vendor related cybersecurity risks. A recent study by Forrester found that nearly 60% of companies experienced a data breach due to a third-party vendor in the past year. But what are the most common vendor cyber gaps that organizations should be aware of?...