Cut Risk, Not Corners: Streamlining the Third-Party Lifecycle with Risk Assessment Data

The modern organization relies on a larger, more integrated network of third parties and suppliers now compared to any point in history, a dependence that cuts both ways. On one hand, the vast third-party ecosystem that powers modern business allows companies to act nimbly, and do more with their current resources. At the same time, it can be a serious challenge to keep up with the demands of an expanding network of third parties, each with their own risks and lifecycle requirements.

The Third-Party Risk Lifecycle

This growing vulnerability gap begs the question: how can the third-party risk management (TPRM) teams that oversee growing networks, manage growing risk across the third-party lifecycle for each of their relationships?

One increasingly popular solution is a third-party risk exchange network, or a central repository of standardized, validated third-party assessments that risk teams can use to eliminate the need to build and send a full questionnaire to each individual third party. An effective risk exchange eliminates time-consuming, inefficient manual processes, including piles of documents to review, data managed in spreadsheets, and communication only through email, that hold organizations back from taking complete control of their third-party risk posture. A third-party risk exchange enables faster, more reliable decision-making at each step of the third-party lifecycle.

Let’s dive into each step of the lifecycle, and explore how a third-party risk exchange can help your team work smarter, faster, and more effectively.

1. Prioritizing the Right Third Parties

One of the best ways to maximize your risk team’s output is to ensure your efforts are directed at the third parties that matter the most. Not all third parties should be given the same resources and attention; i.e. a custodial service with limited data access will require fewer information security controls than a cloud service provider with access to sensitive customer and employee information.

A risk exchange network makes deciding which third parties to prioritize more efficient in two ways:

• It enables your team to quickly assess inherent risk for each third party, ensuring that you have a complete a picture of each third party’s importance to business operations, and the potential harm a vulnerability or outage could cause.
• If further scrutiny is needed based on inherent risk, your team can use the library of attested risk assessments found in an exchange to immediately evaluate the third party’s risk posture.

2. Identifying and Assessing Third-Party Risk

The time it takes your team to gather and decipher risk assessment data is a key metric for determining how efficient your TPRM program is. In a third-party ecosystem made up of increasingly large and interconnected relationships, inefficiencies quickly multiply to the point where you’re forced to leave third parties unassessed and potentially risky.

A risk exchange remediates this challenge by:

• Granting your team access to a repository of instantly available third-party assessments, eliminating the pressure to fully assess your entire network with your internal resources.
• Providing your team with automated risk profiles for third parties not yet on the exchange, based on similar vendors and the third party’s publicly available data. This reduces the need for manual assessment work and potentially difficult vendor communication.

3. Conducting Due Diligence

Conducting due diligence is time-consuming and resource intensive. To add to the pressure, while your team conducts due diligence, there’s sure to be another internal business unit waiting on you to finish. The less efficient the process, the longer your organization has to wait to enlist the third party’s services or product.

With a third-party risk exchange, the due diligence process is made more efficient, reducing resource expenditure and granting access to third parties in a timely fashion. An exchange includes a repository of attested and validated risk data, plus the option to access external data through the platform, further validating the assessment.

4. Ongoing Monitoring and Emerging Threats

Like organizations themselves, third-party relationships never stay static; the risk posed by a given third party will wax and wane with developing trends and threats. Your organization can’t rely on outdated, point-in-time data to make ongoing decisions. You need to be able to trust that your TPRM tools will keep you updated on the threats and challenges posed to your organization as they emerge, so you won’t be caught unprepared by a major risk development.

This is why you need a risk exchange with ongoing monitoring and assessment capabilities. By providing real-time alerts into threats as they emerge, a risk exchange enables your organization to proactively address risks before they escalate.

5. Periodic Reporting, Metrics and Analytics

Third-party risk management often relies on internal collaboration between different functions and departments, making your ability to address risk only as strong as your ability to quickly and accurately communicate your organization’s risk posture. Your team needs to be ready to generate ad hoc, monthly, and quarterly reporting on the status of each third party in its portfolio, as well as overall risk and efficiency metrics that represent your program.

A risk exchange platform aids in this process by automatically producing data visualizations that communicate actionable insights, reducing the time necessary to both compile and analyze data across teams, departments, and functions. With reports that go as deep as a technical analyst needs, or stay high level for the board of directors, you can customize your third-party risk data to meet the needs of your business.

The ProcessUnity Global Risk Exchange

When choosing a third-party risk exchange, you need to make sure that the platform you choose provides the quality of data your organization needs, with a repository large enough to cover your entire third-party ecosystem.

With the world’s largest library of 18,000 validated third-party risk assessments, the ProcessUnity Global Risk Exchange provides accurate third-party data, validated by external risk analysis partners and continually updated by third parties themselves.

To learn more about what the ProcessUnity Global Risk Exchange can do for your organization, check out this report from GRC 20/20 that demonstrates exactly how much value our exchange can provide over time.

To speak to the ProcessUnity team about the Global Risk Exchange, and our suite of third-party risk management AI tools, contact us today.