Make your third-party risk management process extremely efficient by using these tools and techniques.
How to ensure supply chain security
No organization works alone. Without a connected supply chain, organizations can’t deliver products and services that keep them ahead of the competition. However, risk managers have very little visibility into the security practices of their third-party vendors. At a time when 92 percent of US organizations have experienced a breach that originated with a vendor1, risk managers must prioritize supply chain security.
Visibility is the greatest challenge of supply chain security. To manage third-party cyber risk, organizations must be able to evaluate a vendor’s security posture by monitoring their behavior and the security programs and controls they have in place. Yet, many risk managers continue to rely on yearly, manual self-assessments that can’t provide objective, real-time insight into potential cyber liability and risk in the supply chain.
Continuous monitoring of vendors’ security posture gives managers immediate insight into cyber risk in their supply chain. Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides daily Security Ratings that enable managers to identify cyber risk in the supply chain and work with vendors to achieve significant and measurable risk reduction.
Best practices for managing supply chain security
Managing risk in the supply chain requires risk managers to identify potential issues with third-party security through a cyber risk assessment and proactively decide how to mitigate risk and implement cyber risk best practices.
There are four steps that are essential for managing third-party risk and cyber security in the supply chain.
Understand the scope
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud technology and outsourced services, it’s more critical than ever to identify third-party and fourth-party vendors within the extended supply chain. Risk managers must have clear visibility into the entire supply chain, including third-party vendors’ use of subcontractors and service providers.
Assess risk posture
While traditional risk assessment questionnaires and annual security audits offer a point-in-time snapshot of security, these approaches can’t identify recent changes in security posture or uncover cyber risks that suppliers may not know about. Conversely, continuous monitoring provides a near real-time evaluation of a supplier’s security posture and any behavior that may indicate increased risk.
Communicate with vendors
Working together with a vendor’s security team, risk managers can help improve supply chain security for both vendors and their own organization. By sharing security information with vendors, organizations can collaboratively address vulnerabilities and risks such as malware, file sharing activity, or anomalies in user behavior they may not have been aware of.
Share assessments with leaders
Clear, transparent communication with the organization’s C-level executives can help transform how teams assess, manage, and scale risk across the supply chain. When reporting to leadership, it’s critical to communicate in non-technical terms to ensure that executives without deep security experience can fully comprehend the risks facing the organization and the potential outcomes of security programs.
Bitsight For Third-Party Risk Management
Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management delivers continuous monitoring capabilities that enable risk managers to improve supply chain security with the resources they have available today. Bitsight immediately exposes risk within third-party and fourth-party vendors, allowing risk managers to focus their efforts and budgets to achieve significant and measurable cyber risk reduction.
Through daily Security Ratings, Bitsight offers visibility into the riskiest issues that impact supply chain security. Security Ratings measure a vendor’s security performance based on externally observable data such as evidence of compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed data breaches. With this data, Bitsight provides a daily security rating for each company and alerts risk managers when there is a change in a vendor’s security posture. Bitsight ratings proactively identify issues within the supply chain, prioritize and streamline assessment, and drive conversations with vendors around security controls.
Benefits for supply chain security
Bitsight delivers essential capabilities risk managers need to manage supply chain security and quickly launch, grow, and optimize third-party risk management programs, including:
Identify risky third-party and fourth-party connections
Bitsight helps risk managers identify third and fourth parties in the supply chain. With Bitsight, risk managers can quickly identify and highlight risky business connections and emerging threats that stem from weak security programs.
Assess risk posture throughout supply chain
Bitsight Security Ratings provide an immediate, near-real-time snapshot of the security posture of vendors throughout the supply chain. With these data-driven insights, organizations can track the security posture of their vendors and vendors’ subcontractors, receiving alerts when activity or behavior may indicate a weakened posture.
Communicate security ratings with vendors
Bitsight’s Enable Vendor Access (EVA) capability enables companies to triage risk in collaboration with vendors. With access to the Bitsight platform, third-party vendors can investigate forensic data on potential security issues in their environment such as malware, vulnerabilities, or anomalies in user behavior. Risk managers can track which vendors have used the platform and view recent actions they’ve taken to improve their security posture in specific areas.
Report on supply chain security
Bitsight’s reporting tools make it easy to communicate issues and progress in supply chain security to executives. Bitsight reports make security performance understandable and accessible to even non-technical audiences, enabling more informative and productive conversations about risk in the supply chain. Cyber security risk assessment report samples and templates provide ready-made reports, or users can create custom reports on the fly.
A Security Manager's Guide To Third-Party Risk Management
Why choose Bitsight?
Greater visibility
Bitsight provides more comprehensive visibility into cyber risk, with insights into insecure IoT systems, mobile applications, and filesharing. Additionally, Bitsight has the largest sinkhole network to deliver data on compromised data that is highly correlated to breach.
Prioritization and context
To allow organizations to allocate more resources to the largest areas of cyber risk, Bitsight Security Ratings automatically prioritize issues based on severity and importance of the assets affected. Bitsight calculates importance in a more diversified way to ensure that critical assets are ranked higher.
An engaged community
The Bitsight platform has the largest community of cyber risk interactions within a robust community of more than 2,100 customers who share ratings with more than 170,000 third-party organizations.
FAQs: What is supply chain security?
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