Today, cybersecurity is rightly on everyone’s mind. The ITRC tracked 3,205 data compromises, while increased AI availability is causing the scale of security ecosystems to grow even more; with multiple tools being used in a variety of ways by both businesses and their partners.
To build and maintain trust, businesses need to scrutinize not just their own security, but the security of their entire ecosystem. Every business relies on vendors to build parts of their product. And with introduction of each vendor there is additional risk, making third party security the business’s responsibility. Because in the event of a breach, a customer won’t care about who was responsible; only why it has impacted them.
The time of risk management being exclusive to a single organization is long gone, making managing third-party risk an even greater priority for leaders. But when IT and security resources are already stretched, how realistic is this?
Scaling to secure the business ecosystem
Admittedly, it’s not easy for businesses to keep up with the growing compliance burden and to maintain a strong security posture. According to Vanta’s State of Trust Report, global business and IT leaders cite a lack of staffing (33%) and of automation to replace manual work (32%) as the top blockers to proving security externally. Adding to this is the fact that 98% of organizations worldwide have integrations with at least one third-party vendor that has been breached in the last two years.
To meet their security needs, businesses must scale their third-party risk management program and find new ways, including utilizing AI tools, to manage the extensive workload this incurs. Fortunately this is more within reach than ever. So, what needs to change to enable businesses to do a lot with a little, and ensure their security posture isn’t weakened by limited resources and legacy systems?
Centralize vendor reviews
Vendor security reviews are a key component in protecting business ecosystems. But the number of applications and third-parties businesses use is growing. In 2022, organizations worldwide were using 130 SaaS applications on average. Further, vendors are changing all the time and reviews often involve regular, manual, multi-step processes. For instance, it can take hours to scour through information in the documents supplied by vendors, such as SOC 2 reports.
The answer for businesses is a solution that can automate faster, more efficient security reviews. One that can cover the breadth of the vendor relationship before, during and after. This includes managing everything from onboarding vendors, to utilizing AI to gather security vendor information, to analysing and extracting findings. Having these details along with risk assessment in a single source of truth can drive visibility and cross-functional awareness and ownership.
Bring costs down
Today, as many as 60% of companies reduced or were planning to reduce IT budgets. This shows just how little businesses are working with, not to mention startups that run a leaner operation. But regardless of budget or head count, there can be no compromise on security.
Automated third-party risk management solutions can reduce the strain on threadbare teams and ensure their time is spent on strategy, not tedious manual tasks such as vendor discovery, documenting findings and offboarding. Automating these tasks ensures that IT and security budgets – however limited – work harder, with teams focused on the work that delivers the biggest ROI.
Keep the ball rolling
A collaborative effort between stakeholders in executive leadership, procurement, information security, IT, legal and compliance makes the difference when managing third-party risk.
This is a tall order for any business, and leaders need to balance speed and business enablement, while doing due diligence around new vendors. Third-party risk management solutions bring a depth and breadth of automation like integrating with your procurement tooling that efficiently maintains compliance and quickly reacts to internal needs. This gives security teams relief and transforms third-party risk management from being point in time to a continuous, standardized process.
Adapt to AI
The future of trust in an AI world is less than certain, with 42% percent of experts saying they are equally excited and concerned about the impending “humans-plus-tech” evolution. But while businesses might not be able to control how AI evolves (or how quickly), they can control how they manage security.
The rise in AI tools being used across vendors, and their associated risks, are complicating third-party risk management, creating a tricky balance for businesses who must develop more comprehensive oversight, but also make sure they are not hampering innovation. With their customer data and reputation on the line, keeping tabs on the AI tools used by vendors, and the associated security risks, is one area where businesses must ensure their decision making is clinical.
AI can actually help organizations manage this. Through its ability to scrub large amounts of information in little to no time, AI can help you find the information you need, dig deeper and even answer any remaining compliance questions.
Put minds at ease
Third-party risk management isn’t new, but it has gotten harder to manage, and businesses must think bigger to anticipate and minimize risk as much as possible.
Moving from reactive to proactive third-party risk management can help businesses take the pain out of the process and maintain a security posture that doesn’t derail their priorities. This involves reducing manual work via automation and using AI to free up time for more strategic security work. The end result? You and your team grow in confidence, helping your workplace feel a lot more secure – in more ways than one.
We list the best IT management tool.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JpXukHGqkZ8gapEzDQNqRW-1200-80.jpg
Source link
