You need a TPRM program now

Third-Party Risk Management is the interaction or business dealings that you have with entities outside your  own operations.  Traditionally, it was vendors.  Today, this extends to service provides, contractors, supply chain partners, even customers.

These relationships pose many risks to you, including cybersecurity, financial, operational, legal, reputational, and regulatory risks. Effective TPRM helps you minimize these risks by ensuring that your third-party relationships are aligned with your risk tolerance, compliance requirements, and business goals.

Here is why you need to migrate your TPRM program with a focus on cybersecurity today:

• Improved risk management: TPRM helps you identify, assess, and manage risks associated with your third-party relationships, which can reduce the likelihood of negative consequences and protect your organization’s assets and reputation.
• Enhanced compliance: TPRM helps ensure your third-party relationships comply with relevant laws and regulations, reducing the risk of penalties and legal liability passing to you.
• Better due diligence: TPRM helps you thoroughly evaluate your critical relationships and make informed decisions about which relationships to pursue and how to manage them effectively.
• Improved supplier relationships: TPRM helps you build strong relationships with suppliers and vendors, ensuring that you receive goods and services you need to operate effectively.

“The Way We’ve Always Done It”

In the software development world, teams used a “waterfall” method to build a program.  Waterfall is a sequential, linear approach that consists of requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and deployment. Each stage must be completed before the next one can begin, and there is limited opportunity for changes or revisions along the way. The problem is that it is slow and highly prone to error.

Most companies get stuck developing their TPRM using a waterfall method that looks like this:

1. Contract review and negotiation: Review existing contracts to ensure that they contain appropriate security provisions and allowance for assessments.
2. Categorize TP’s: List all your TP’s, work with business units to determine criticality, and then classify all TP’s as critical, high, medium and low risk. 
3. Risk Normalizing: Consider what needs to be done for each category and frequency. How often do you send a questionnaire?  What questionnaire do we send each?  How often do we do a validation assessment? Align all this with contracting provisions.
4. Monitoring and review: Monitor of third-party vendor activities and performance, including regular reviews of their security controls.
5. Incident response and management: Develop and implement procedures for responding to security incidents involving third-party vendors, including investigations, remediation, and reporting.
6. Termination and transition planning: Plan for the termination of third-party vendor relationships, including ensuring a smooth transition of services and protection of assets.
7. Policy and procedure development: Document all of this into policies and procedures for third-party risk management, including guidelines for vendor selection, due diligence, risk assessment, monitoring, and incident response.
8. Training and awareness: Provide training and awareness programs for employees and third-party vendors on the importance of TPRM and related best practices.

Obviously, this is an incredibly slow process, can’t accommodate for dynamic changes, and prone to failure.  This puts your organization at risk.

Agile, on the other hand, is a more flexible and iterative approach. It emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and responding to change. The team regularly reassesses and adjusts priorities based on feedback and changing business needs. Agile moves fast and produces quick results.  

Consider the two approaches:

How to migrate to an agile TPRM program in 10 days or less

An agile approach to TPRM lets you get started NOW!  You iterate along the way and build the program as you go. You reduce risk immediately and create a program that is based on changing reality.

Here are the steps:

1. Pick out your Top 5 Critical Third Parties (TP): A Critical TP is one whose products or services are essential to the functioning of your organization. Losing a TP has an immediate and severe impact on your ability to remain in business.  These are the TP’s that keep you up at night.

2. Evaluate the results: With a direct attack surface assessment, you will have current and accurate information of the TP’s security posture. Is there a vulnerability that puts you at risk?

3. Decide how to proceed: Can you work with the TP to help them fix or mitigate their vulnerabilities?  Or do you need to take mitigating actions to offset the risk.  Perhaps you need to introduce new technical controls on their ability to operate with you.  Your response is specific to the risk and the services or products the TP provides.

4. Do the next 5 Critical Third Parties: Once you’ve reduced risk on those first 5 Critical TP’s, move on to the next 5. 

This approach allows you to reduce risk immediately and build a practical TPRM Program based on quick time to value.

What FortifyData Provides

FortifyData can get your TPRM Program started on your first 5 Vendors.  We are so confident, we Guarantee it!

Call us today to schedule a 30-minute demonstration.  We will show you how it works, give you pricing and an agreement that you can execute on quickly, if you chose to do so.