Managing third-party vendors is a fact of life for many organizations, and one factor that is important to consider (yet often overlooked) is whether one or more of your vendors may be vulnerable to outside intrusion in any way, and equally important is a validation process to verify that your systems are compliant and function according to specifications.
Vendor policies and procedures, providing training to all responsible parties related to vendor management within the organization, monitoring vendor-related litigation or regulatory issues, and monitoring contract terms and service level agreements, by bringing together industry-specific skills in technology, regulatory compliance, financial and accounting and other business processes, you assess your third party risk management program, not to mention, as organizations continue to outsource, form partnerships and share data with third parties, a strong vendor risk management program that stays ahead or risks in the information supply chain has to be a top priority.
Today, more than ever before, a programmatic approach to identity and access management is singularly important to the safety and security of your organization and critical assets, the HIPAA security rule requires covered entities to assess data security controls by conducting a risk assessment, and implement a risk management program to address any vulnerabilities that are identified, to begin with, understanding the true return on your investment with a vendor is crucial to making solid business decisions.
With an enterprise contract management platform, legal can pull data on how different indemnity clauses have performed to choose the best language, identify suppliers or customers with reputational issues using data from third parties, and assign precise risk ratings to contracts or classes of contracts as a whole, while project management is basically ensuring that the companys KPI requirements are met, some of the trends in the industry seem to be evolving towards the more intangible side of a project and its team, rather than just plain metrics, as a rule, no matter how many new tools you install, settings you adjust, or events you remediate, there are few ways to objectively determine your security posture and that of your vendors and third parties.
Importantly, security ratings have proven useful for more than just analyzing third-party vendor risk, therefore, view it vendor risk in the purview of the larger third-party risk management program.
Some enterprise privilege session management solutions also enable IT teams to pinpoint suspicious session activity in-progress, and pause, lock, or terminate the session until the activity can be adequately evaluated, now, it is more critical than ever for them to plan and execute leadership programs and initiatives that have a positive impact on your organization and its leaders, additionally, an audit of the personal data your organization holds and the flow of personal data both within your organization and between your organization and third parties will be critical to implementing an effective process.
What is more, in some organizations individual business units have different ways of tracking suppliers, making it difficult to compare and collate them across an entire organization, so today, risk management continues to demand greater attention from boards of directors.