Mitigate Risks within your Supply Chain by assessing and analysing how secure your Vendors are. Go further by Monitoring and Managing Risk
Assess the Controls you have within your organisation that are employed to manage your Risk.
Build in internal compliance policies or use existing frameworks if you're operating in a Regulated Industry for New & Ongoing projects. Then simply Identify Assess, Manage and Assign Risk!
Identify which three of the ESG factors pose a Risk to your organisation or Investment & which ones help you achieve your Sustainable Development Goals.
The increasing exposure of software supply chain vulnerabilities through cyberattacks has brought renewed focus on third-party risk management programs, as well as the tools used to oversee them.
According to KPMG, 73% of organisations have experienced at least one significant disruption from a third-party cyber incident within the last three years. And with breaches involving third parties costing businesses more than $4.29 million on average - investment in vendor risk frameworks is increasing at a rapid rate.
Not only has this influx in breaches caused greater awareness and regulation from governments but it’s also encouraged greater data hygiene practices within businesses. Good data hygiene is about creating a culture where data protection is a priority and a collaborative effort, both within an organisation and its people but also externally through third-party vendors and their ecosystem of partners.
The challenge we often see is that many organisations are seeking greater vendor risk transparency too late in the game. Historically, Vendor Risk Management (VRM) was implemented due to compliance needs but this has evolved with more and more businesses benefiting from greater data hygiene throughout their supply chain.
A business looking to mitigate vendor risks needs to ensure they have an end-to-end view of their supply chain, a cause for businesses to implement stronger and scaled vendor risk management solutions.
Before implementing a vendor risk management solution, you first need to understand the approaches you need to cover to ensure you have a full proof risk management tool:
The first two approaches here are proactive, ensuring you have complete knowledge of your vendor risk before partnering and the latter is ‘after the fact’ - consistent monitoring so you’re in constant knowledge of risks and in the know of a data breach to your supply chain.
While there are tools for each that a business can implement, this can cause headaches to implement and run with your existing processes. The solution is having a Vendor Risk Management platform which covers all three elements while providing automation for each, Providing you with seamless monitoring and analysis, even with little resource and engagement - the result is a great return in the knowledge and understanding of your supply chain risk and greater trust and verification.
When automation is used within vendor risk management, businesses can greatly reduce their cybersecurity risk, improve information security and scale at a quicker rate than ever before.
Historically, vendor risk analysis was a heavily manual process, requiring multiple analysts to frequently assess and review each vendor. Now, thanks to machine learning this process of verification and analysis can be completed automatically, quickly establishing what percentage of compliant a vendor is, identifying where improvements need to be made and verifying if these have been carried out and can then repeat the process to ensure risk is always management and mitigated.
Providing a cost-effective solution, as fewer resources are required, change is made and monitored automatically.
The scale and capabilities of vendor risk management platforms also allow businesses to begin vendor analysis at a much earlier stage.
Historically, organisations would begin risk assessing at the contract signing stage, but with assessments often taking days or weeks to complete this would delay work starting. With an effective VRM solution, businesses can introduce short initial vendor assessments at the RFI stage.
This allows businesses to shift left when it comes to implementing greater security measures, ensuring the trust of a vendor is there from the outset and in turn reducing the onboarding time for new vendors.
Third-party environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk assessments are an important way to ensure that your company works with partners that share its values. While ESG risks aren’t new, legislation is becoming more aggressive, for example, the UK Modern Slavery Act requires organisations to publish annual statements detailing the steps taken to ensure that modern slavery is not taking place both within the business and across their supply chain.
An organisation needs to ensure its vendor risk management process incorporates an ESG strategy. Organisations need a robust and agile framework that delivers a holistic view into the extended enterprise and can deliver automated ESG assessments and continuous monitoring of information across the organisation and its relationships.
Additionally, incorporating ESG considerations into vendor risk management processes requires education and training on these issues. By investing in education and training for all stakeholders involved in the supply chain, businesses can improve their overall vendor risk management strategy and achieve greater success in mitigating risks.
In conclusion, effective VRM is critical to every organisation, particularly in reducing risks and protecting against the high cost of third-party cyber incidents. An end-to-end view of the supply chain is essential for mitigating risks, and automation and education are crucial tools in scaling VRM solutions. By adopting a comprehensive and agile VRM framework, businesses can gain greater trust, verification, and security for themselves and their partners.
Book a demo of our platform to learn more about how to manage your supplier risk and compliance today.