Scale Integration of Vendor Risks and Remediation

While third-party vendors may help your organization in performing its business operations smoothly, they also make up the biggest risk to your organization’s cybersecurity framework. Risks arise especially because you have no eyes or control over how these vendors perform their functions. Therefore, appropriate risk assessment and remediation plans have to be developed.

Since there could be numerous third-party vendors involved in your day-to-day business operations, there has to be a way to scale your vendor risk assessments and remediation efforts. Here, scaling means that you gain more visibility into all the vendors collaborating with your organization in a cost-effective manner.

Here are some ways in which you can scale the integration of vendor risks and remediation in your organization.

Communicate with your top-tier staff

In order to scale the integration of vendor risks and remediation, you will require both financial and human resources. Therefore, you must convince the executives in your organization of the importance of integrating vendor risks and remediation. In order to that, you should convey to them the key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be improved by integrating vendor risks and remediation. Convince them that it is worthwhile to invest the money and other resources in the integration of vendor risk management processes.

Use questionnaires

You may have a number of vendors working for you on different aspects of your business operations. The integration of vendor risks and remediation may seem difficult because of the inherent differences in therisksposedby different vendors. Questionnaires provide a common ground for presenting the same, carefully designed risk assessment and remediation questions to all the different vendors working for your organization. Therefore, questionnaires are an effective way of scaling all vendor risks and remediation.

Train your security

staff for your organization to scale the integration of vendor risks and remediation, it is important that you train and educate the information security staff in your organization.A trained and experienced team will be able to tactfully handle the scaling operations of vendor risk–remediation integration.

Enable routes for robust communication with vendors

Since scaling is all about going from a single vendor level risk management to a multi-vendor one, it is important that you are able to communicate with multiple vendors in a robust and flawless manner. You must have open communication channels that allow you to promptly and simultaneously communicate any risk and remediation issues to all the respective vendors that caused them in real-time. This will help you scale the integration of vendor risks and remediation.

Automate

When new third-party vendors get added to your list of vendors, you should be able to adapt the processes of vendor risk assessment and remediation for all these new vendors in your organization. This scaling will be both swifter and more efficient if you automate your risk management workflow. Software such as BizzSecure’s EAID solution can help you achieve this effect.

Conclusion

Integrating vendor risks with remediation is the best way to secure your organization from the harmful cyber threats posed by your third-party vendors. Follow the steps we have mentioned above and scale the integration of vendor risks and remediation in your organization.