While many enterprises have taken tremendous strides in recent years to measure and manage the cyber risk present within their own IT systems, they struggle to extend that vigilance to third-party risk.
That’s a problem in a time where third-party systems increasingly make up the backbone of modern IT. Enterprises today leverage cloud resources and technical connections with vendors and partners to go to market faster, meet customer demands, and stay competitive. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with those third-party relationships, but they
have the potential to come with a risky dark side.
After all, organizations entrust more of their crown jewels to third parties every day. They’re sharing customer data with SaaS providers that help them with analytics,
storing intellectual property on public cloud platforms, openly connecting their internal systems with the networks of technical partners. And the list goes on. Each of these relationships has the potential to add considerable risk to the enterprise, because every third party that touches those crown jewels has the potential to compromise them.
As such, the more that enterprises build out their digital ecosystems, the more important it is for them to see and manage cyber risks incurred by their thirdparty relationships.
