In the course of performing security assessments for our clients, we came to the realization that many were struggling with the sheer volume of assessments they were being asked to perform. More assessments means more data, and handling a lot of data at once that lives between spreadsheets and emails can be chaotic and leads to errors. On top of managing the data, overseeing the actual relationships with third-parties, building trust, and the addition of new tools can cause a headache. In this article, we outline 5 challenges we’ve seen customers face when it comes to third-party risk management and identify ways to grow in 2024.

1. Budget

Problem: Creating a budget is hard, especially when your stakeholders don’t see the value in the pain points your team is facing day in and day out. Finding ways to prioritize security, solutions, and headcount is important when you’re working with a tight financial situation.

Solution: Find ways to automate the small things so that your team can focus on the big picture of your security needs.Start can help with automation, which can combat your headcount dilemma.

2. Managing Multiple Vendors

Problem: Your team is trying to keep track of contacts, documents and contracts, and communication across potentially hundreds of vendors, and likely across different platforms and tools.

Solution: Using a vendor management system like Start helps you centralize information, as well as automate a lot of those tedious TPRM tasks, which takes away the stress of trying to manage multiple vendor relationships. We have a parent-child relationship that tracks different vendor locations under one company, which allows you to keep all your information better organized.

3. Building Trust

Problem: When managing critical suppliers or other important third-party vendors, it is important to build and maintain a strong level of trust. When there is a lack of visibility and transparency, it leads to frustration, confusion, and an unwillingness to collaborate. It can take years to build trust, but it only takes one moment to lose it. Prioritize building trust with the vendors that are an integral part of complex supply chains. For example, the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry has a complex and supply chain that involves multiple stakeholders. It involves multiple stakeholders and has continuously changing consumer demands.

Solution: At Start, we strive to provide our M&E clients with unprecedented visibility and influence over their third-party vendors, which can be done through the use of automatic customized questionnaires. Customized questionnaires provide you with the opportunity to learn how your vendors and suppliers are managing cybersecurity risk. It also gives your team a chance to manage the relationship more effectively and mitigate overall risk. Questionnaires provide you with information for the risk assessment processes and are critical to ongoing monitoring.

Have the tough conversations. Focus on more collaborative conversations around strategic growth, spend, enhancing performance, and advancing your team and vendors to the next level of success. Walk into 2024 with a trust-based mindset and find ways to simplify your current TPRM programs by learning about different ways to improve.

Keep lines of communication open. Vendor Roster is a business facing portal that updates you throughout the process, both in the tool and via emails about vendors that you have subscribed to. It keeps you up to date on any delayed communications, reminders, and due dates. This is critical as it helps you stay up to date on many moving parts.

4. Vendor Compliance

Problem: Ensuring that your vendors are following your policies is critical to the success of your organization, but this can be challenging to monitor when you are managing multiple vendors at once who are located around the world. Mitigating compliance risk will protect your business from unnecessary levels of risk that are caused by things such as insufficient control systems, lack of due diligence, lack of training, and human error.

Solution: Clearly communicate compliance requirements during the onboarding process with each new vendor. Conduct regular audits to ensure compliance is taking place.

Also tailor the controls in questionnaires to the vendors based on services provided so that they can work on what is most important to them instead of giving them hundreds of controls, then can instead is focus on the ones relevant to them. Not every vendor needs to meet the same controls, so why waste their time with control questions that aren’t relevant to them? Instead, save them time by having them focus on things specific to the service they are providing as your vendor, and save your team time by not having to review lengthy questionnaires! Start automatically reduces the questionnaires based on your standards and tags to the service types. So, costume makers aren’t answering questions about film production, and film production isn’t answering questions about costumes!

5. Close the Knowledge Gap

Problem: Offering trainings is important to keep your vendors up to date on the latest security practices for your organization. The tech industry and cyber criminals are constantly evolving, and your vendors need to know how to protect your projects that they are working on from malicious attackers.

Solution: Schedule trainings and knowledge checks on a regular basis to ensure that your vendors are following best practices. To cut down on the chaos of trying to track multiple trainings for hundreds of vendors, Start offers a training module, which has the capability to allow you ensure that your vendors are completing your required security trainings by tracking and assigning trainings on an individual basis. 

Conclusion

We know that managing third party risk can be a daunting and overwhelming task when you don’t have the team or budget you need. Whether its managing multiple vendors, budget restrictions, or ensuring vendor compliance, we hear you. Here’s what we recommend:

1. Automate the small things to save budget for bigger things.
2. Use a vendor risk management system to centralize information.
3. Use customized questionnaires to build trust with your vendor and keep lines of communication open.
4. Close the knowledge gap by enforcing regular trainings and knowledge checks.

 If you’re looking for new ways to strengthen your TPRM program in 2024, consider talking to the experts at Start!