Whether you're a CISO, Vice President or individual contributor, you understand that information technology has changed how we do business, for better and for worse. Technology has brought speed, scale, and better customer experience to all aspects of commerce and communication, but it has also increased cybersecurity risk, particularly data breaches, cyber attacks, and other cyber threats.
Business partnerships require trust, but knowing which vendors you can trust to protect your customer's PII and PHI is difficult. With the rise of information technology, there are countless ways that trust can be broken, whether intentionally or unintentionally. As a starting point, you need additional information about information security policies, internal security practices, incident response and disaster recovery plans, and any past security incidents.
The risk of a data breach with significant financial consequences and damage to brand equity is the fear of most large publicly traded companies. But many smaller businesses wrongly assume they are too small to be on the radar of the threat actors. The truth is that it is all about the data, and small businesses often have less well-guarded and well-defined structures for their data stores.
The Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Tool (HECVAT) is a security assessment template that attempts to generalize higher education information security and data protection questions and issues regarding cloud services for consistency and ease of use. HECVAT has various versions that are free to use and provide a consistent, streamlined third-party risk assessment framework.
When it comes to building a security program, one of the most frequently overlooked areas is that of vendor management. Organizations focus significant resources on internal security, such as vulnerability scans, centralized log management, or user training, while not extending the same diligence towards their third-parties. Organizations end up trusting the security of their network and data to an unknown and untested third-party. As we all know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Engaging with third-party vendors for the provision of goods and services isn't new. The level of digital transformation, paired with the number of third-party relationships and business partners the average organization has is. Third-party risk management programs need to evolve the manage this ever evolving type of risk exposure. Enterprise-wide organizations rely on third and fourth-party vendors. And many of them have access to sensitive data.
Vendor risk management is hard. And it's getting harder. But it doesn't have to be. Business units are outsourcing more of their operations to third-party suppliers. In turn, these suppliers outsource to their own service providers. It's undeniable, the average organization's exposure to third-party risk and fourth-party risk has never been higher.
