Third-party risk management is the process of managing risks that organisations are exposed to as a result of relationships with vendors, customers and other external parties. These essential relationships could endanger your organisation as you do not have control over their environments or the ability to effectively implement and manage controls to mitigate any risks.
To effectively manage the risks that third parties pose to your organisation, you should ensure that you have the following in place:
- Standardised, accurate and adequate reporting of third parties;
- Identification, tracking and logging of all third parties;
- Tools to properly and effectively manage third parties;
- Defined methods for conducting risk and other assessments; and
- Effective solutions and enterprise-wide frameworks for managing and securing third parties.
The consequences of unmanaged third-party relationships could introduce challenges ranging from faulty products from suppliers, cloud service outages and a whole host of third-party provider data breaches. Organisations are more frequently using third-party suppliers to deliver or augment their products and services, and those suppliers in turn also…
