The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework has been around for more than 15 years and began as an important financial factor, evaluated by investors as part of a corporation’s due diligence. Today, ESG has gained more popularity among regulators and investors, and the emergence of greater concerns around data privacy and other social interests has pushed ESG objectives closer to those related to technology and cybersecurity. This popularity has been driven by consumer attention to every company’s impact on the world, in addition to the attention of investors and shareholders who heavily weigh how the environmental, social and governance factors impact a company’s success and accountability. Best practices require auditing an enterprise’s vendor network for compliance with ESG objectives, just as they would for cybersecurity compliance. Thankfully, solutions like the ProcessBolt platform allow for both ESG and security audits.
Let’s briefly rundown the elements of ESG:
- Environmental: Focuses on the impact your company has on the environment and its environmental footprint. Factors evaluated include carbon emissions, energy usage, waste, etc.
- Social: Focuses on relationships, and how your company impacts people. Factors evaluated include diversity, inclusion, labor relations, etc.
- Governance: Focuses on how your company governs itself. Factors evaluated include decision-making, abiding by laws, data security, etc.
Social and Governance
When investors evaluate a company, they look at numerous factors in addition to finances, such as how the company conforms to ESG goals, and also the technology in place to support those goals, as well as the company’s cybersecurity policy and action plan. Investors may dig deep into these areas, looking to uncover anything that might be a potential danger and ultimately damage their investment.
The cybersecurity-ESG connection pertains mostly to the Social and Governance objectives:
Social: Every company has a strong commitment to a variety of stakeholders, which can include employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, and the communities in which they do business. A breach of security or of privacy is detrimental to any company and its stakeholders in more ways than one. To safeguard the company’s reputation and its stakeholders, it must adhere to strict cybersecurity and privacy policies. These policies should include a clear plan not only to protect its stakeholders if a breach occurs but also what the company will do to remediate the incident.
Governance: While no company is 100-percent safe, the right people and technologies can help safeguard a company from a breach or attack. Technology platforms to handle vendor risk management, data security, data privacy, user authentication, attack surface management, and more are critical in this cat-and-mouse game. At many companies, the Board of Directors will be actively involved in the selection process for technology platforms and personnel, and also the implementation of the relevant policies whether they involve ESG, privacy, security, or any other regulatory compliance structure.
All-in-One Cybersecurity Platform
Although uniform ESG regulations have not been agreed to, nearly all publicly traded companies and many large private companies have set their own ESG goals. ProcessBolt’s unique design makes it ideally suited to map to any set of ESG goals and provides for automated auditing of vendors’ compliance with those goals. So if you are using ProcessBolt to assess your vendor networks for security compliance, you can just as easily use it to audit for ESG compliance. If you are still evaluating potential solutions, why not consider one that solves many of your audit objectives in one efficient platform?
Uniquely built to address the needs of all industries, the ProcessBolt platform can reduce the time it takes to complete and/or review assessments by up to 80 percent and can help identify risks facing your company.
The four components of the ProcessBolt Platform include:
- Assessing Vendors (for Enterprises): Replace time-consuming VRM processes with a fully automated platform. Use your own workflow, scoring methodology, and questionnaires (or our templated questionnaires). Gain quantitative and actionable insights into the security of your organization and compliance with any requirements you have of your vendors regardless of the regulatory framework.
- Receiving Assessments (for Vendors): More efficiently and accurately respond to assessments from your customers. Questionnaires in Word, Excel, or Chrome are auto-matched to your answers stored in our Knowledge Base. Shorten sales cycles and stop wasting time completing similar questionnaires.
- ThreatScape: Scans attack surfaces and cross-checks against aggregated threat information. Gain visibility and insight into the riskiest issues impacting your business.
- DocAI: Scans and analyzes any document (Word, PDF, etc.) so you don’t have to. Ask any English language question and DOC Ai responds with the answer gathered from the content. Ideal for lengthy policies, procedures, or other vendor artifacts.
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