RANT Roundtable in partnership with SecurityScorecard

The average security employee has probably got a pretty clear idea of what third-party risk management (TPRM) is all about. Your company has probably got a system in place that quizzes your suppliers, your suppliers’ suppliers, and their suppliers, annually monitoring their ongoing compliance, giving your board a level of reassurance that you’re aware of any potential risks that may arise.

But as well as only providing a snapshot of how things looked for a brief moment, and being ridiculously labour-intensive to operate, these questionnaire-based approaches to TPRM often fail to consider the intangible risks. Chief among those may be the damage to your reputation that could befall as a result of a breach or a failure in your supply chain.

Take the case of one international banking group. When a secure-document services provider experienced a breach, media reporting singled out their biggest customer, and the negative publicity landed at the bank’s door. Another household-name finsec firm has a supply chain involving over 8,000 third parties, and an internal team to monitor them that numbers only three employees – who probably spend most of their time manually entering free-text questionnaire responses into the database.

Our friends at SecurityScorecard emphasise that addressing reputational risk requires organisations to adopt a consistent, automated, next generation approach to TPRM. Join representatives from the firm, and a host of your cybersecurity peers, for a RANT forum that will discuss how you can move beyond outdated practices – and more effectively manage your third-party risk portfolio – without overloading your already stretched risk-management team.

Have a look at Security Scorecard’s reports on:

• The United Kingdom Top 100 Companies: Cybersecurity Threat Report
• Buyer’s Guide: Supply Chain Detection and Response
• Accelerate your DORA readiness with SecurityScorecard