3rd-Party Risk Management

Today’s businesses rely on 3rd-party vendors to provide critical outsourced services so they can better focus their efforts on the core competencies of their organization. While beneficial and convenient, using outside operators inevitably introduces businesses to cybersecurity risks, as it becomes necessary to share sensitive or confidential data with said 3rd parties without having full visibility into or control of their information security practices. Considering most companies don’t keep a comprehensive inventory of 3rd parties with whom they share sensitive information—many work with hundreds or even thousands—it’s also not surprising that cyber attacks from these 3rd parties have grown significantly in the past few years.

It’s for these reasons that 3rd-party risk management is important. Our Wavestone experts work with companies to ensure that they have an effective 3rd-party risk management strategy in place to properly identify, evaluate, and manage any related threat potential. An effective 3rd-party risk management strategy should take into account the criticality of a vendor when defining the requirements, and ensure that requirements are defined over the entire lifecycle so that security and compliance protocols are set in place for the long term.

Successful 3rd-party cyber risk management must be cross-functional and cover all bases by incorporating key business leaders in procurement, legal, business, and security.

Wavestone works with companies to define appropriate governance models, as well as to ensure that all processes and checks are running effectively and the necessary calibration to these processes can be correctly identified and implemented.