We’ve all heard the phrase “You’re only as strong as your weakest link”. In the IT Security world the “weakest link” could end up costing an organization hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
We do all we can to place the latest and greatest technologies at our perimeter, endpoints and everywhere in between to avoid having the next headline-making breach. Even with all these cyber security efforts, third-party vendors could be “leaving the door open”.
Vulnerabilities from third-party vendors were the cause of both the Bon Secours Health System and Sentara Healthcare breaches. In a recent study done by Soha Systems, 63% of data breaches are linked directly or indirectly to third-party access. Surprisingly, only 2% of respondents surveyed consider third-party access a top IT priority. Scary!
Third-Party Vendors play a key role in keeping an organization operational. This includes your EMR vendor, financial auditors and consultants. You do business with hundreds, maybe thousands of vendors that have custody of your sensitive data and/or require access to your network to complete their job. Do you know how they are protecting your data?
It is extremely important to understand your vendor’s security posture to determine the risk of doing business with them. The process of creating questionnaires, gathering and then analyzing the data for these vendors can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive.
What a relief it would be to have:
- Automated vendor evidence collection
- Risk assessments designed specifically for your industry to measure third-party vendors for security and data risk
- Access to a vendor repository where evidence is immediately available for you to apply to your own risk assessment
You can have all of this with Prevalent Third-Party Vendor Risk Management.
Want to learn more? Contact us and a Brite rep will reach out!
