Developing A Third-Party Cyber Security Risk Management Process
As companies in all sectors bring on new vendors at an accelerating pace, third-party cyber risk management has become more important than ever. Yet with shrinking budgets and smaller headcounts, third-party risk management teams are under extraordinary pressure to onboard vendors faster and with less expense.
The third-party cyber security risk management process is complex and full of difficult decisions. Without an efficient, effective process, managing the onboarding and assessment of hundreds or thousands of vendors can be overwhelming and won’t be done to properly protect your network from cybersecurity risks.
That’s where Bitsight can help. With a suite of technologies built on an industry-leading Security Ratings Service, Bitsight enables your teams to streamline the cyber security risk management process to better mitigate risk to scale your vendor onboarding process to match your organization’s third party risk management needs.
Making Your Risk Management Process More Efficient
Creating a more efficient and scalable cyber security risk management process requires attention to three areas of your risk management program.
Security program policies
The key to onboarding vendors quickly while mitigating risk is to have the right policies in place for the entire vendor lifecycle. For example:v
- Establishing policies around accepted risk thresholds can help to streamline onboarding by winnowing out vendors that don’t meet your security requirements before you spend time fully assessing and onboarding them.
- Collaborating with procurement, legal, compliance, and financial departments will help to make sure that policies accurately reflect the goals of everyone in the organization, and that they are universally agreed on up front.
- Using security ratings can help to streamline vendor onboarding by getting an initial look into a potential vendor’s cybersecurity hygiene, allowing security managers to prioritize the most secure vendors and eliminate non-conforming vendors before they go through an in-depth and time-consuming security assessment.
- Policies that trigger reassessment based on a change in security posture can help to reduce the amount of work in the assessment phases of a third-party risk management program and avoid letting risks linger in your network between auditing cycles.
The reassessment process
- To streamline the reassessment process, many companies are shifting from a standardized approach that treats all vendors equally and asks everyone the same questions, to a tiered approach that manages reassessment based on the risk each vendor poses to the organization. Vendors working closely with business operations and sensitive data will belong to a more critical top tier, while vendors who pose less inherent risk will reside in a lower tier. By spending more time and effort reassessing top-tier vendors and less time with lower tier vendors, your risk management team can save time on the cyber security risk management process while mitigating risk more effectively.
- Choosing continuous monitoring technology rather than yearly or periodic assessments can provide you with immediate alerts when a vendor’s security posture changes. This information can automatically trigger reassessment if the change is concerning.
Communication with the board and executive leadership
- Sharing your cyber security risk management process and findings with your executive leadership and board provides the information they need to make budget decisions and provide educated oversight. Demonstrating success of your cyber risk management framework can help encourage continued support for your efforts. Communicating with this diverse group of leaders requires metrics that make sense to individuals who may not be deeply versed in cybersecurity jargon, along with context that help prioritize the risk associated with each metric.
Bitsight For Third-Party Risk Management
Bitsight facilitates the cyber security risk management process with a solution designed to expose and directly locate risk in your supply chain. Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management works with Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings Service to provide continuous cyber risk monitoring of the security posture of every vendor in your portfolio. By helping to strengthen policies, streamline assessments, and simplify communication, Bitsight enables you to establish a more efficient and effective cyber security risk management process.
Bitsight Security Ratings, an integral part of every Bitsight solution, provide a dynamic measurement of security performance of an organization and its vendors. Much like scores in the credit ratings industry, Bitsight Security Ratings are generated through the analysis of externally observable data. Bitsight continuously gathers and analyzes massive amounts of security data from hundreds of sources to look for evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. Ratings are generated daily, providing a near real-time assessment of a vendor’s security posture.
Supporting The Cyber Security Risk Management Process
Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides capabilities that let you:
- Increase operational efficiency. Bitsight provides tools to help summarize and communicate the risk associated with each vendor relationship. By locate specific points of risk across your entire vendor pool without having to wait for vendor communication of risk or exposure, Bitsight streamlines the task of measuring risk for hundreds or thousands of vendors.
- Enhance portfolio performance. Bitsight provides insight-at-a-glance into risk levels across your entire third-party vendor portfolio. With a clear picture of cyber risk aligned to your organization’s risk tolerance, you can make confident, data-driven decisions about your cyber security plan and prioritize resources to drive more efficient risk reduction.
- Accelerate onboarding. With Bitsight, you can reduce the time and cost required to onboard vendors. You can also make your cyber security risk management efforts more scalable by using workflow integration, smart tiering recommendations, and risk vector breakdowns to identify areas of known risk.
- Customize reassessments. Bitsight makes it easy to reassess vendors based on their tier and performance, rather than using a standard template or auditing cycle. With Bitsight Security Ratings, you can tailor your reassessment program to reduce cost, minimize time, and allocate resources to areas where they are needed most.
- Continuously monitor performance. Bitsight provides near real-time updates on changes to vendor security posture and risk vector grades, and alerts vendor risk managers when something is noticed on their network.
- Manage incidents effectively. When a vendor experiences an incident, Bitsight can send alerts both to you and the vendor to remediate security issues faster and more efficiently.
Why Bitsight Is #1 In Risk Management?
Bitsight was founded in 2011 and today is the world’s leading Security Rating Service for third-party cyber risk assessment. Seven of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies, and 20 percent of the world’s governments rely on Bitsight to manage cyber risk.
Bitsight enables organizations to improve cyber security and risk management throughout the vendor lifecycle. As a proven cybersecurity assessment tool, Bitsight Security Ratings help organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and third-party risk management. By enabling more complete security visibility and evaluating how well a vendor is protected from cybersecurity threats, Bitsight helps organizations to streamline the cyber security risk management process and manage risk more efficiently and effectively.