Do you need to unlock more functionality, make your ventures more profitable, or reduce costs? Then, most likely, you use third-party services to reach new heights. And yet, despite how handy they may be, they introduce potential cybersecurity risks to your business operations.
Do you want to mitigate these dangers and avoid staining your business image? Then you’d do well to incorporate the following best practices into your third-party risk management plan.
1. Conduct Third-Party Screening
Third-party screening ensures you only choose the right partners to be working with. Thus, it allows you to stay in the driving seat and proceed with confidence.
In practice, it translates to establishing a risk score for each of the potential partners. You can base this score on their countries of operation, location, etc. Moreover, can your third-party partners present the appropriate certification when it’s necessary?
Either way, third-party screening is something that should be taking place on an ongoing basis.
2. Assess the IT Vendor Risk
If you’re allowing a third party to access sensitive company data, you are putting yourself at risk of an incident.
Now do bear in mind there is a difference between paranoia and risk assessment. It’s something you should take into consideration, rather than let it fill you with fear. It’s a good idea to assign a risk profile to each vendor and make your decisions based on that.
3. Evaluate Your Own Methods
Your third-party risk management methods may be robust, but they are never perfect. Hence, you should try to stay as objective as possible and test whether what you’re doing is working out for you.
Make adjustments wherever needed: to your processes, codes of conduct, assessments, and policies. Moreover, check your methods frequently to ensure you don’t delay remediation upon noticing the warning signs.
4. Identify the Risks
When it comes to controlling third-party access to business platforms, the risks will always be there. And they’re not straightforward either. It ranges from suppliers all the way to service providers, vendors, and other parties. Everyone can have a potential effect on your organization.
While you’re at it, make sure to differentiate the different types of risks too. These can fall within the lines of system failures, non-compliance, political, contract breaches, and so forth.
Remember that threats don’t always come from the outside. Human error and insider threats can cause as much or more damage. That is why many companies limit remote access to their systems and resources with software like NordVPN Teams. Moreover, they track the permission rights of each employee to ensure no one can access more than they need to.
5. Know Your Fourth Parties
No matter what type of business you run, you should have a firm grip on your supply chain. In other words, visibility is the key. You should always ask yourself whether the third-party you’re collaborating with is doing the work. They can get a fourth party involved without you even knowing.
If you are not aware of the possible subcontractors, it can increase the risk. And if there’s indeed a fourth party involved, make sure they’re screened and compliant too.
6. Apply Consistency Across Every Department
It’s best to apply a consistent approach across every function and department to avoid redundancies. It will make things faster and more efficient when it comes to onboarding, audits, performance monitoring, etc.
Having a pre-set plan also ensures that you won’t be wasting valuable time trying to determine what the right approach is. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with making your o rules and standards and abiding by them without exceptions.
7. Use Data-Driven Technology
One of the best ways to fix the current mistakes is to learn from the ones made in the past. Through the use of data-driven technology, you can:
- gain an understanding of what went wrong,
- what triggered it,
- streamline the emerging processes to mitigate emerging risks.
The structure of your business hasn’t changed much over the years? Then why not tap into the knowledge database you’ve created, learn as much as possible, and use that to shape the future of your business?
Conclusion
By following the risk management practices, your organization should gain a strong foothold in securing a stable future. So know the risks, build a structured approach to mitigating them, and don’t be afraid to do whatever it takes to learn along the way.