As business processes become more complex and operational risks increase, organizations are increasingly turning to third parties to streamline processes and drive operational efficiencies. While outsourcing third-party services has significant benefits, these relationships come with significant—often unforeseen—risks. The increasing complexity of third-party relationships is leaving organizations much more vulnerable to breaches – 60% of cyber breaches occur via third-party vendors.
As the threat landscape and IT environments continue to evolve and become more complex, it is becoming increasingly challenging for organizations to effectively manage cyber risk. Additionally, many organizations lack the resources and cyber security talent to run effective programs. The confluence of these factors is causing organizations to turn to MSSPs for key cybersecurity services. As effectively managing vendor risk is a critical component of a robust cybersecurity program, MSSPs should offer vendor risk management services to help their customers manage this critical risk.
Why Vendor Risk Management Can Be Challenging for MSSPs
Offering vendor risk management services can be challenging for MSSPs given the complexity of managing this risk at scale and the difficulty in pricing these services. Below are a few factors that make it challenging:
- Customized Programs: Organizations have different compliance, privacy, and security requirements, requiring MSSPs to create a customized program for each customer.
- Exhausting Resources: The vendor risk management process can be manual and time-consuming.
- Expensive Existing: GRC tools can be expensive and challenging to operate and manage.
- Multiple Tools: A robust vendor risk program has historically required multiple disparate tools.
Finding ways to address these challenges can enable MSSPS to offer effective and efficient vendor risk management services to their customers.
The Key Components of a Robust Vendor Risk Management Program
To offer effective vendor risk management services to their customers, MSSPs must have the following components:
- Automated Risk Assessment Software You can leverage vendor risk management software to assess vendors, score assessments, flag risks, facilitate remediation efforts, and provide complete visibility into the security posture of your customers’ vendors.
- Attack Surface Management (ASM) Software While risk assessments provide a snapshot of a vendor’s security posture at a single point in time, with ASM software, you can continuously monitor the internet-facing attack surfaces of your customers’ vendors to identify and flag adverse changes to their security posture in between assessments.
- Assessment Review Process It is critical that you review the evidentiary documentation that is part of the assessment process to verify that the answers provided are consistent with documented policies and procedures.
How ProcessBolt Can Help
ProcessBolt’s fully-integrated AI-driven vendor risk management platform uniquely enables MSSPs to efficiently and effectively manage vendor risk for their customers due to the below key features.
AI-Driven
ProcessBolt is disrupting the vendor risk management process by leveraging AI to automate the assessment process. ProcessBolt AI is a fully-integrated platform that extracts intelligence directly from vendor policy documents to populate security assessments and correlates that data with the vendor’s attack surface intelligence, simplifying a very manual and time-consuming process. This enables you to focus your efforts on mitigating risks and remediating issues with your customers’ vendors instead of chasing down vendors to complete assessments and reviewing hundreds, if not thousands, of vendor documents.
Offering vendor risk management services at scale can create challenges for MSSPs in terms of the manual work that is still required for an effective vendor risk management program.
ProcessBolt is the only vendor risk management tool that leverages AI as part of the assessment process, streamlining a very tedious process.
Fully-Integrated Attack Surface Management & Assessment Automation Functionality
While it is typical for vendor risk management tools to offer assessment automation functionality OR attack surface management functionality, ProcessBolt’s fully integrated platform offers assessment automation and attack surface management functionality, enabling MSSPs to offer vendor risk management services with a single tool.
In addition to being able to offer vendor risk management services to your customers with a single tool, our fully-integrated platform enables you to correlate attack surface data to assessment responses, helping to verify assessment results.
Configurable and Easy to Use
ProcessBolt was built to address the fact that many organizations lack the budget or staffing resources to manage complex GRC tools. We developed the software so that a single employee can manage the entire vendor risk management process. The no-code platform is adaptable to any regulatory framework and makes it easy to configure complex workflows to create customizable programs for all of your customers.
ProcessBolt makes it easy, efficient, and economical for MSSPs to offer vendor risk management services.
Contact Us
Contact us today to learn how ProcessBolt can help you offer vendor risk management services to your customer base.
