Performing effective due diligence and vendor risk assessments is a critical aspect of your Third Party Risk Management program (TPRM). But they’re often perceived as time consuming and painful activities for both your organization and your third party vendors.
Third Party Risk Management as a Service (TPRMaaS) allows you to simplify and improve your existing TPRM program by leveraging external expertise to scale without the need for additional staff or resources. TPRM managed services solutions provide the necessary people, processes, and technology to efficiently understand vendor risk, helping you remediate inefficient controls and protect your supply chain from third party risks.
How can managed services help you face TPRM challenges?
We’ve recently discussed the benefits of combining TPRM with GRC platforms and business analytics tools, but how about combining TPRM with technical expertise?
The sheer volume of third parties your organization interacts with is an overwhelming responsibility for any security team. The need for automation, scalable processes, and a single source of data is more pressing than ever, but teams usually face challenges like:
- Difficulty in finding risk management qualified resources
- Scalability issues due to lack of resources
- Manual processes for vendor evaluation and tiering
- Lack of visibility over scattered third party networks
- Lack of prioritization of different levels of risk
- Difficulty in showing results and progress
In response, third party risk management as a service can work with your existing processes and automation tooling or develop custom solutions to ensure comprehensive vendor risk assessments, security ratings, and continuous monitoring.
This makes it easier for your organization to identify, assess, and manage risks posed by the interconnected network of third party vendors, in line with industry-specific compliance standards.
A fully managed TPRMaaS solution improves visibility and performance across your supply chain by combining purpose-built tools with technical expertise from risk experts and security practitioners.
Having your risk management operations planned, built, and run as a service allows you to establish and operate your TPRM program with repeatable processes and techniques.
The deep expertise of the managed services team will guarantee the continuous tweaking and improving of your process until you’re able to show steady progress.
Managed services for third party risk assessments
If your organization needs support in assessing third party vendors due to lack of formalized processes or resources, or if your team can’t keep up with risk assessments demand, third party risk management as a service can help you.
The service can include everything from process optimization, vendor identification and prioritization, end-to-end risk assessments, monitoring, and reporting.
Experts manage the vendor intake all the way through completion, so you don’t have to chase your vendors to have them fill out security questionnaires or send their latest certifications. This includes:
- Managing intake forms and importing the data to a dedicated TPRM platform
- Validating and reviewing third party provided artifacts (SOC-2, PCI AOC, etc.)
- Identifying areas of potential risks to be further reviewed
- Opening findings based on critical risks and perform necessary follow-up to address them
- Providing a summary risk report for each third party vendor reviewed
Through our TPRM by ThirdPartyTrust solution, a team of risk management experts can provide automation and advice to reduce the efforts needed in assessing and monitoring third party vendors. Here’s how:
Managed services for questionnaire responses
If your organization needs support in responding to customer security reviews and assessments, managed services can help you respond quickly and with confidence in your security posture to expedite the process.
The service can include everything from process optimization, profile building, readiness review, and risk remediation reporting. Professional guidance will help you run and manage these processes easily with proven methodology, and access to an adaptable technology.
This will ensure processes align to your business objectives, appropriate frameworks, and regulatory requirements, while reducing cost and enabling a faster sales cycle.
Through our Beacon by ThirdPartyTrust solution, a team of security and compliance experts can provide automation, document management, and expert advice to reduce the efforts needed in a comprehensive security assessment response program. Here’s how:
Our managed services can help you reduce your sales cycle by up to 60%, letting risk officers worry about what really matters: running a business that shows a solid security posture.
Improving visibility and results
Companies often highlight the manual and repetitive tasks that are taken care of, and how manual efforts are dramatically reduced. Teams can trust that the TPRMaaS team is behind them, following up on the assessment process, reaching back to their vendors or customers and overseeing the entire TPRM program.
Meanwhile, they’re able to see standing results and go from uncertainty to clarity regarding:
- The vendor portfolio’s prioritization and status
- Who are the most important or critical third party vendors
- Where lie the highest risks
- What security gaps need to be worked on
- Fluent communication with third parties
Our ThirdPartyTrust platform can be an integral part of this strategy, combined with the deep expertise of a team of TPRM specialists who are ready to help grow and scale TPRM initiatives.
