Cloud applications have opened up limitless opportunities for most organizations. They make it easier for people to collaborate and stay productive, and require a lot less maintenance to deploy, which means they’re much more affordable and easy to scale to your needs. But for all of their benefits, cloud apps also open up your organization to a host of new risks. By enabling users anywhere access to corporate resources you lose the visibility and control that perimeter-based tools provide.

Higher education institutions, like colleges and universities, often work with dozens of third-party vendors, which can introduce considerable security risks if the school doesn't maintain a proper vendor risk management (VRM) program. Compromised third parties can pose serious risks to universities, which can expose sensitive data, disrupt business continuity, or incur serious financial damages.

The spotlight on cyber risk quantification (CRQ) has raised its status to the top of the hypercycle, but with fame comes scrutiny and criticism. Security analysts and practitioners debate the validity of each model framework, along with the data used when modeling cyber risk. Despite this debate, there is a unifying consensus that knowing the possible range of the financial impact of a cyber event is far more optimal than flying blind.

‍Cyber vendor risk management (Cyber VRM) is the practice of identifying, assessing, and remediating cybersecurity risks specifically related to third-party vendors. By leveraging data from data leak detection, security ratings, and security questionnaires, organizations can better understand their third-party vendor’s security posture using Cyber VRM solutions.

Our new CFO cybersecurity survey, which surveyed 180 CFOs, CEOs and other financial executives worldwide, has highlighted the fact that Chief Financial Officers are very confident in their companies’ abilities to ward off cyber security incidents, despite being underinformed on the cyber risk their businesses face. Almost 87% of the surveyed executives expressed this confidence, yet 61% of them had suffered at least three significant cyber incidents in the previous 18 months.

Cybersecurity is a team sport, and SecurityScorecard is proud to partner with the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to share cyber threat information in defense of public and private critical infrastructure.

During the Vendor Risk Management process, information is in constant flux. From risk assessments to risk remediation processes, communication involving sensitive security control data continuously flows between an organization and its monitored vendors. If intercepted, this information stream could be used as open source intelligence for a third-party data breach campaign, nullifying the very efforts a VRM program is trying to mitigate.

The vulnerabilities perforating the global supply chain have remained dormant for many years. But the violent disruptions of the pandemic finally pushed these risks to the surface, revealing the detrimental impacts of their exploitation to the world.

Cyber VRM is the practice of identifying, assessing, and remediating the cybersecurity risks of third-party vendors. This involves combining objective, quantifiable data sources like security ratings and data leak detection with subjective qualitative data sources like security questionnaires and other security evidence to get a complete view of your third-party vendors’ security posture. A Cyber VRM solution facilitates this practice.

The technology industry is at the forefront of digital transformation, enabling all other industries to achieve greater operational capabilities and connectivity through innovative solutions. Tech companies, such as SaaS vendors, provide crucial software infrastructure to hundreds or even thousands of other organizations. These vendors access, store and transmit large volumes of sensitive information, including valuable healthcare and finance data.