Third-party vendor data breaches are becoming an epidemic for organizations that themselves have solid information security programs. The Ponemon Institute has proven year over year in its survey that the cost of third-party data breaches increases with each survey. Many struggle with how exactly to hold third-party vendors accountable and enforce the same rigid standards and controls that they consume internally. The big question is: how do organizations prevent third-party vendor data breaches?

New technologies often present interesting challenges for security teams, with cloud services such as AWS, Azure and GCP providing particularly novel cases in comparison to “classic” on-premise systems. As cloud services race to add new features that drive new customer interest and increase retention of existing clients, there is a very real risk of exposing new threat vectors to the business if even the most minor of misconfigurations occurs.