Third Party Risk Management
Manages the risk introduced by vendors handling IT infrastructure, SOC services, payroll, application development, data analytics, and cloud services on your behalf.
A vendor's weakness becomes your exposure.
Organizations hand third parties their IT infrastructure, SOC services, payroll processing, application development, data analytics, and cloud platforms, so they can concentrate on their core business. Those benefits carry risk with them.
How much risk depends on how deeply the third party is integrated and how much data and access it has been granted. A weakness on their side lands on yours. The Target and SolarWinds breaches are the reference cases for exactly that path.
An effective TPRM program assesses and manages that risk continuously, not once at onboarding. Our consulting covers both the high-level program components and the ongoing vendor risk management processes, built against your own regulatory context rather than a template.
What this achieves.
Protection
Safeguards the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information managed by external vendors.
Visibility
Gives a clear view of who your vendors are and how each one fits into your ecosystem.
Risk assessment
Identifies redundancies, vulnerabilities, and excessive risk exposure once vendors are catalogued.
Regulatory compliance
Supports compliance with NIST CSF, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and Saudi PDPL.
Breach prevention
Implements protective protocols once exposure points are understood.
Better decision-making
Provides a structured approach for identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing third-party threats.
Five components of the program.
Before any vendor is assessed, the program itself has to exist. These are the five components we build with you.
Governance and Oversight
Management's expectations for how third parties and their risks are managed, with a committee charter and named roles.
Policies and Standards
The TPRM policy itself, mapped to the regulations that actually apply to your sector.
Processes
The processes that carry risk across the full third-party lifecycle, from identification through to termination.
Technology Assessment
A review of the tools and technology supporting your TPRM processes, and recommendations on what they are missing.
Metrics and Reporting
Reports on third-party risk and performance, pitched separately at each level of management that has to act on them.
Six stages, start to finish.
Identification
Gain visibility over every supplier that meets or exceeds the defined risk threshold.
Classification
Assign a risk criticality level to each supplier, setting the depth of assessment required.
Assessment
Evaluate the risk each supplier introduces against your organization's frameworks, verifying controls are in place.
Onboarding
Obtain sufficient security information about the supplier, their fourth parties, and their infrastructure, documented in contract terms.
Monitoring & Management
Continuously monitor vendor risk posture through compliance checks, performance reviews, and incident handling.
Termination
Enforce confidentiality agreements, recover organizational data and assets, and revoke system access.
What you receive, phase by phase.
Project Initiation
Scope, project plan, project team roles and responsibilities, and the project timeline.
Establishing TPRM Governance
Governance structure document, roles and responsibilities, committee charter, vendor risk tier criteria, vendor risk assessment methodology, and performance metrics.
Policies and Standards
The TPRM policy, and the schedule of regulations that apply to you.
Processes
Documented processes for identification, classification, assessment, onboarding, monitoring and management, and termination.
Technology Assessment
Findings on the TPRM tools and technologies currently in use, with recommendations.
Vendor Assessment
Using the processes built above, a number of existing vendors assessed for risk level from their questionnaire responses, with detected issues logged and a risk response selected for each.
Where this connects.
Information Security Management
The ISO 27001 system TPRM plugs into, and the risk methodology vendor assessments run against.
Compliance
NIST CSF, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR and Saudi PDPL all require third-party controls to be assessed.
Compromise Assessments
For when a vendor incident raises the question of whether it reached your own estate.