The Top 10 Third Party And Supplier Risk Management Software
Discover the best supplier risk management software. Explore features such as supplier data aggregation, risk monitoring, and risk analysis.
Written by Caitlin Harris
Technical Review by Laura Iannini
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Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform
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BitSight Security Ratings
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LogicGate Risk Cloud
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LogicManager Vendor Management System
Third party risk management software, also known as vendor risk management or supplier risk management software, helps organizations assess, monitor, and manage the security risks associated with using external service providers. They provide assurance that third parties and suppliers, who have access to sensitive data, do not become a source of business disruption, data breaches, or non-compliance.
In order to do this, the strongest third party and supplier risk management software provide a comprehensive overview of supplier risk data, which can be shared between the company and the supplier, as well as out-of-the-box workflows for assessing and analyzing supplier risk. They should also enable suppliers to upload standardized documentation via a self-service portal for more efficient risk analysis and to streamline the process of managing vendor relationships. Finally, they need to monitor changes to third party or supplier risk—and alert admins to those changes—and integrate well with other risk and compliance software for ease of management.
In this article, we’ll explore the top third party and supplier risk management software. We’ll look at features such as supplier data aggregation, risk monitoring, and risk analysis. We’ll give you some background information on the provider and the key features of each solution, as well as the type of customer that they are most suitable for.
Mitratech Prevalent is a unified third-party risk management (TPRM) platform that automates vendor risk assessment, monitoring, and remediation across the entire third-party vendor lifecycle. It enables efficient, centralized control of third-party risk and compliance obligations.
The platform supports key phases of the vendor lifecycle, including sourcing, onboarding, performance management, and offboarding. It centralizes RFP/RFI workflows and consolidates data such as ESG, reputational, cyber, and financial risk to improve visibility during vendor selection. Intake processes are streamlined with simple forms and a centralized repository of vendor information accessible across the organization. SLAs, KPIs, and KRIs are tracked in-platform to evaluate vendor performance and support compliance monitoring.
Mitratech Prevalent uses risk scoring to classify vendors by inherent and residual risk. Their built-in AI capabilities help auto-complete assessments, while a library of over 800 templates supports rapid evaluation. Continuous monitoring integrates external intelligence—such as cyber threats and regulatory alerts—with assessment data to validate vendor controls. Offboarding tools automate contract assessments and termination procedures to mitigate post-engagement risk. The solution offers on-demand access to pre-completed assessments, and optional managed services to support TPRM program maturity.
In summary, Mitratech Prevalent is built for organizations facing increasingly complex vendor ecosystems and is suited to those that require scalable, consistent risk oversight. Its automation, assessment tools, and lifecycle management capabilities help teams reduce manual workload while improving third-party governance.
Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform
Based in Kansas, US, Archer is a leading provider of IT governance, risk, and compliance software, with a focus on enterprise risk management. Their Integrated Risk Management Platform is designed to give organizations a streamlined view of their supplier relationships and make it easier for them to manage vendor risk.
Archer’s Integrated Risk Management Platform offers a wide range of pre-built and customizable risk assessment questionnaires to help businesses gather supplier risk data efficiently, in a standardized format that’s easy to analyze. The solution’s Security Risk Monitoring feature then delivers continuous, actionable insights into which risks are the most severe, allowing security teams to prioritize their remediation actions. As well as measuring third party risk, Archer’s Integrated Risk Management Platform enables organizations to identify all their existing supplier relationships and contracts, then document them in a central repository, along with information on who within the business is responsible for each relationship. This gives organizations a clear view of their dependency on third parties.
The platform also offers performance management functionality, which provides users with key performance and service level agreement (SLA) metrics for each third-party service, so they can easily deduce whether that service is performing as it should.
Archer is praised by existing users for its granular levels of customization and strong reporting functionality—particularly when it comes to visualization. Some, however, report that customizations can be complicated, and require technical expertise to set up effectively. As such, we recommend Archer’s Integrated Risk Management Platform to mid-sized organizations and larger enterprises with lots of supplier relationships, and who are struggling to both manage those relationships and assess their risk.
Archer Integrated Risk Management Platform
BitSight Security Ratings
BitSight is a cybersecurity provider based in Massachusetts, US, that specializes in quantifying and reducing digital risk. The BitSight Security Ratings platform offers a solution for Third Party Risk Management, which combines vendor validation, cyber risk governance, and continuous monitoring to provide assurance that third party and supplier transactions pose as little risk to your organization as possible.
BitSight Security Ratings enables organizations to assess vendor risk quickly and regularly through pre-built and custom questionnaires, which allow for the immediate identification of severe risks in the immediate (third party) and extended (fourth party) supply chain. The platform’s Portfolio Risk Matrix feature generates a daily risk score for each vendor. It continuously monitors risk—including potential risk—across each relationship and suggesting whether remediation actions should be taken. Finally, BitSight offers objective, quantitative reporting options that make it easier to accurately assess risk, as well as deliver evidence of managing third party risk for auditing purposes or to provide assurance to key stakeholders. BitSight also offers an Advisor service, which enables businesses to utilize a team of experts to help optimize their risk assessment and remediation workflows.
As well as quantifying supplier risk, businesses can use BitSight to assess the performance of their cybersecurity tools, with continuous monitoring of how effective each tool is and automated vulnerability remediation options.
BitSight Security Ratings deploys in the cloud as-a-Service, which gives the platform scalability and flexibility. Customers praise the solution for its user-friendly, at-a-glance risk scoring, as well as its in-depth reporting into which risk areas require remediation, and in what order. We recommend BitSight Security Ratings for Third Party Risk Management as a strong solution for organizations looking to continuously monitor their vendor risk, as well as the effectiveness of their own security tools.
BitSight Security Ratings
LogicGate Risk Cloud
Headquartered in Illinois, US, LogicGate is a risk management software provider that focuses on helping businesses streamline and more efficiently manage workflows to reduce security risk, as well as improve compliance with data protection standards. Risk Cloud is LogicGate’s cloud-based governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solution, which offers a suite of risk management applications designed to help businesses create custom, repeatable processes and workflows, without having to write any code.
LogicGate Risk Cloud is designed with ease-of-use at its core. The platform features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface for mapping risk management processes and workflows—such as vendor onboarding and risk surveying—which admins can automate for improved efficiency and to ensure that risk assessment surveys are completed within set deadlines. Workflows can also be set up with conditional routing rules, based on how third parties answer questions on a form. Organizations can use Risk Cloud to build risk assessment forms, as well as easily capture supplier risk data within their workflows, with support for file upload and storage. Finally, the platform offers flexible reporting, with fully customizable dashboards. Reports into third party risks throughout the vendor lifecycle can be generated on demand with one click, and easily exported into a variety of formats for ease of sharing with key stakeholders.
LogicGate Risk Cloud is a fully cloud-based platform, making it quick to deploy and easy to scale. The platform offers easy integration with other systems via RESTful API. Users praise Risk Cloud for the ease with which they can build forms, manage custom workflows, and create reports, as well as the high-quality assistance offered by LogicGate’s support teams. We recommend LogicGate Risk Cloud as a strong solution for mid- to large-sized organizations looking for an intuitive way to manage supplier risk, without the need for in-depth technical knowledge.
LogicGate Risk Cloud
LogicManager Vendor Management System
LogicManager is a market-leading provider of third party and vendor management solutions, based in Boston, US. Their Vendor Management System (VMS) enables organizations to carry out standardized, quantitative risk assessments for each of their vendors, with automated workflows for efficiency and built-in risk analysis to help inform mitigation efforts. The platform also offers robust reporting capabilities, with intuitive data visualization dashboards that can be used to help drive decision making processes.
LogicManager’s VMS offers customizable questionnaires that enable businesses to quickly assess vendor risk, including which of their third parties have access to sensitive data. These questionnaires can be customized using LogicManager’s library of industry-specific risks, to help you collect essential information. Assessments can be set up as recurring, to streamline the re-assessment process and ensure that you’re always working with the most up-to-date risk data. The platform offers a broad range of reporting tools, including an assessment of the criticality of each vendor’s risks that helps businesses prioritize remediation efforts. This also includes the Risk Analyzer AI tool, which automatically extracts key information from risk assessments, such as renewal dates and breach notifications. LogicManager will highlight any risks that are common amongst multiple vendors, helping to deduplicate remediation actions.
LogicManager deploys in the cloud as a SaaS platform, making it highly flexible and scalable, thus suitable for growing mid-sized and larger organizations. It also offers integrations with over 50 popular business applications, including WorkDay, Microsoft 365 and accounts payable systems for ease of management. We recommend LogicManager’s VMS as a strong third-party risk management platform, particularly for organizations in the finance services sector, which would benefit from features such as time-sensitive task tracking, and mapping vendor assessments to internal and external compliance policies.
LogicManager Vendor Management System
OneTrust Vendorpedia For Enterprises
OneTrust is a market leader in vendor and third-party risk management tools. Based in Georgia, US, OneTrust streamlines the risk management processes for both enterprises and vendors with their Vendorpedia solution. Vendorpedia for Enterprises combines risk exchange, risk management and automation, which allow businesses to easily obtain risk data without having to manually create and maintain risk assessment questionnaires.
With Vendorpedia’s risk exchange, business can access pre-completed, industry-standard risk assessments, enabling them to analyze vendor risk data and control gap reports without having to manually build, send out, and maintain questionnaires. These assessments are automatically updated as and when vendors update their risk information, meaning that businesses are always working with the most up-to-date risk data. OneTrust validates all assessments to ensure that vendors are giving accurate risk information, then automatically analyzes each assessment and assigns each vendor a risk score via the Auto Inherent Risk feature. This helps triage and prioritize risks according to severity of risk and how much your business engages with that vendor. The platform’s DataGuidance tool then provides intelligence to inform remediation workflows. Finally, Vendorpedia offers near real-time alerting into new risks, making stakeholder notification seamless.
OneTrust Vendorpedia offers flexible pricing options, making it suitable for mid-sized businesses just starting to build their third-party risk management processes, as well as larger enterprises with an established risk management program that they’re looking to scale. Customers praise the platform for its ease of deployment, configuration, and ongoing use. The platform’s powerful integrations and leverage of AI enable it to monitor risk trends and identify potential or likely risks, making it a particularly strong solution for organizations wanting to closely monitor and proactively reduce third party risk over time.
OneTrust Vendorpedia For Enterprises
ProcessUnity Vendor Risk Management (VRM)
ProcessUnity is a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) provider based in Massachusetts, US, that offers a broad range of solutions designed to help organizations of all sizes implement strong GRC programs. To achieve this, ProcessUnity pride themselves on their flexible, tiered pricing plans, intuitive interface, high levels of customization, and cloud-based architecture, which allows for easy scalability and automatic upgrading. Vendor Risk Management is available as part of ProcessUnity’s wider GRC platform.
ProcessUnity’s Vendor Risk Management solution helps businesses manage risk at each stage of the vendor lifecycle. The platform’s Vendor Request Form makes it easy to onboard and vet new vendors by automating initial risk assessments. ProcessUnity assigns each vendor a risk score, classifying the risk according to its criticality and the confidentiality of the data they can access. The platform then continuously monitors each vendor for changes in risk level via automated, regular risk assessment questionnaires, with reminders and completion notifications for both the business and the vendor. A key differentiator of ProcessUnity’s platform is the granular customization offered at every level; businesses can configure risk assessment and remediation workflows to align with their business processes, as well as create custom reports based on metrics key to their organization, such as mapping to regulatory compliance requirements.
ProcessUnity’s VRM platform deploys in the cloud as a SaaS application, with out-of-the-box configurations available for smaller organizations and granular customization options available for larger enterprises. Customers praise ProcessUnity for how effectively it classifies vendors and assigns risk scores, as well as the intuitive reporting dashboards. Some customers, however, report that their support offering could be improved. We recommend ProcessUnity as a strong solution for mid- to large enterprises looking for a third party risk management platform that will help them make informed decisions about which vendors to work with and onboard in the future, as well as identify their current risk levels. Its compliance mapping capabilities also make ProcessUnity a popular solution amongst organizations in the financial services industry.
ProcessUnity Vendor Risk Management (VRM)
SecurityScorecard Third-Party Risk Management
SecurityScorecard, a risk management provider based in New York, US, offers security ratings for risk and compliance monitoring, due diligence, cyber insurance underwriting, data enrichment and executive-level reporting. The platform can be used to assess an organization’s own security posture, or those of third parties, vendors, and suppliers, enabling businesses to identify areas for improvement in their own environment as well as in their third-party relationships.
SecurityScorecard collects data from multiple open source and commercial feeds across the internet. The platform then analyzes this data for indicators of different cybersecurity issues, which it classifies into 10 categories—Factors—such as social engineering, patching cadence, and DNS health. Finally, Security Scorecard assigns each organization a risk score based on its assigned Factors and the severity of those Factors. Risk scores are letter-based, with “A” being the most secure, and “F” being the least. Businesses can dispute their score if a risk was incorrectly associated, correct it if they have preventative measures in place, or appeal it if they’ve remediated the risk. If a score is changed, SecurityScorecard updates it within 4-7 business days, ensuring that customers are always working with up-to-date risk data. As well as risk scoring, SecurityScorecard enables businesses to send and receive security risk questionnaires and compliance documentation, and visualize risks across their third-party ecosystem, making it easier to identify and remediate potential threats.
SecurityScorecard offers a straightforward pricing model that supports organizations of all sizes. A free version assesses the risk of up to five suppliers for smaller organizations, and an enterprise-level version offers fourth-party risk detection, consulting and managed services, vendor comparisons, API integrations, data exporting and self-monitoring reporting, risk trend analysis, and rule-based alerting. We recommend SecurityScorecard to any sized business looking for an easy, reliable way to assess the security risk of their suppliers and third parties, and particularly those that don’t require the vendor lifecycle management functionality offered by some other risk management tools.
SecurityScorecard Third-Party Risk Management
Venminder
Based in Kentucky, US, Venminder is a provider solely of IT vendor risk management solutions, with a focus on risk assessment and questionnaires, contract management, and vendor oversight. The platform combines technology with human intelligence, enabling businesses to leverage the knowledge of Venminder’s team of risk experts as well as the platform’s storage, collaboration, and automation functions.
Venminder has established relationships with thousands of vendors, which allows the platform to authorize the release of security and compliance risk documentation—such as audit reports, business continuity plans, Certificates of Insurance, and security test results—for Venminder customers to access. This means businesses can easily access risk information without having to contact vendors themselves, allowing them to focus on analysis and remediation. Venminder automatically alerts businesses to any updates across their documents, ensuring they’re always working with the latest version. Every documentation and questionnaire is reviewed by the platform’s Document Collection team to ensure all information is accurate, and to produce a report with controls, risk ratings, indicators and recommendations on how to mitigate risk or make updates to meet relevant regulatory standards. This is particularly useful for organizations operating in heavily regulated industries, such as the financial services sector.
Venminder deploys in the cloud and is available via the AWS Marketplace. Customers praise Venminder for its strong support offering—their support team are on call from 8am to 8pm EST. Venminder also offer an online support center, a client advisory board, and user community groups for sharing advice and best practices. We recommend Venminder as a strong supplier risk management tool for organizations in heavily regulated industries such as finance, and those which prefer to leverage human intelligence and support over automation.
Venminder
Whistic Vendor Security Assessment
Headquartered in Utah, US, Whistic is a third-party risk assessment platform that enables businesses to assess their own security, then publish and share that information with customers and other third parties. Businesses can access the Whistic Vendor Security Network to view and evaluate their third parties’ Whistic Profiles, as well as browse the Whistic Trust Catalog for security data on more than 35,000 organizations.
Whistic enables vendors to share their security risk information, certification, and audits with customers via a Whistic Profile. This eliminates the need for customers to create, send, or chase up questionnaires, and saves the vendor from filling out one-off questionnaires for each customer. A variety of questionnaire templates cover many popular requirements and formats, including NIST, GDPR, and ISO standards. The platform also calculates risk scores and triggers re-assessments for each vendor automatically, ensuring that all information remains up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensible.
Whistic deploys as a SaaS application and as a web app, making it accessible and easy to deploy. Customers praise Whistic for its easy, effective streamlining of the vendor risk assessment process, as well as the amount and quality of data they’re able to access through vendors’ Whistic Profiles. The platform has also been rated highly for its responsive, helpful customer support teams. We recommend Whistic as a strong solution for any sized organization looking for an easy way to access third party security risk data, without having to wait around for the completion and return of questionnaires.
Whistic Vendor Security Assessment
FAQs
Third Party Risk And Supplier Management: Everything You Need To know (FAQs)
The success of a TPRM solution depends on how effectively it can identify risks across your entire business lifecycle with associated third parties. The way these risks are identified, understood, and categorized is very important. Generally, risks are classed as known or unknown risks. Unknown risks are risks that are from external factors, like a data breach performed by a hacker. This is unknown as the exact nature of the risk cannot be known and you are unable to predict when it will occur. Known risks are risks that can be identified and described; this means that they are easier to prevent. Known risks tend to be classified into three groups:
- Profiled Risk: This risk refers to the services that a third party provides for your organization. For instance, an outsourced HR or payroll company can present more risk to your business than a catering company due to the nature of the data that it has access to. For example, the HR and payroll company will have access to highly sensitive financial and personal data. The catering company, however, may not have such extensive information, but presents a physical risk as third-party staff will have access to your premises. Risks aren’t always as clear cut and can be layered and complex.
- Inherent Risk: Inherent risk refers to a third-party risk that is present and hasn’t yet been remediated. Inherent risk is calculated by using a third party’s own data on their policies and practices to make a more informed risk assessment. This will include identifying pre-existing supply chain issues, bad financial standing, and operational inefficiencies. Internal risk assessments are important in adding context and clarity to an assessment; they may, however, still not paint a comprehensive picture of a company’s risk posture. External risk assessments can help to fill in these gaps. External vendor risk monitoring and threat intelligence services can help companies to verify assessment responses and identify any unknown or hidden risks.
- Residual Risk: This term refers to any risks that are still present despite remediation efforts. As these risks are impossible to eliminate, you will have to make a judgement to decide if this is a reasonable and justifiable level of risk. Rather than being able to eliminate a risk, you will have to focus on reducing risk to an acceptable level. In this instance, it is important to establish a risk baseline with relevant controls and monitors in place.
TPRM tends to work in stages. This begins with creating a baseline of security, reputational, financial, and privacy risks for potential and current third parties. Ideally, this is performed before a relationship with a third party is established. This is often achieved through questionnaire-based assessments and accessing vendor intelligence databases, then pulling information from these sources.
The vendors that you decide to work with will be onboarded into the TPRM platform’s central repository. From here risks can be monitored and calculated continuously. You can also export data regarding risk and mitigation to relevant stakeholders.
Inherent risk scoring will also be carried out. This allows organizations to understand any potential risks that they might take on, as well as enabling teams to carry out due diligence and inform future risk assessments and mitigation practices. It is considered best practice to complete inherent risk scoring before a vendor is granted access to your system, data, or physical building.
From the TPRM platform, internal controls and assessments can be performed to satisfy audit requirements. Any risks that are identified during this process can be scored, recorded, and mapped, ensuring that your organization remains complaint with security frameworks. External risk monitoring is also performed to cover gaps between periodic assessments and questionnaire responses. This information can be cross-referenced against external observations, thereby enhancing the clarity of a risk assessment. External risk monitoring usually includes using cyber intelligence, financial reports, media screening, sanction lists to gain a comprehensive and holistic understanding of risk.
Finally, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance management will be factored in. SLAs are contractual agreements that help to define the expectations and obligations of all parties within a vendor relationship. A TPRM tool can ensure that these obligations and expectations are met and carried out to the required standard. This often includes ensuring that the third-party vendor continues to meet compliance requirements.
In the event that a third party needs to be off boarded or terminated–either because their level of risk was deemed too severe, or the contract has naturally ended–several things need to happen. Depending on the nature of the termination, assessments need to be performed to ensure that final obligations have been achieved. In this event, contract reviews, revocation of system and data access, revoking building access, settling invoices, and compliance reviews will need to be completed. It is just as important that you ensure all the loose ends are tied up to prevent a threat coming via a company you thought you were finished with.
It is worth pausing to consider how many third parties your organization has. Every company that you use for outsourcing, collaborate with, have partnerships with is a third-party that has the potential to impact your organization. This is set against a backdrop of increasing cybersecurity threats and lateral attacks. Today, companies are more interconnected and linked than ever before. In part, this is due to outsourcing and specialization; it is more efficient and cost effective for a company to do one thing really well, then use other specialized companies to deliver a full package. One company could well have numerous third parties working with them to provide a service and streamline operations.
In many instances, a company may not even be the vendor that produces the primary output and will liaise with a number of other vendors in order to produce a final product. For instance, an architecture firm will need to be in contact with multiple third parties at once, including suppliers, builders, electricians, lighting specialists, legal teams, and financiers. Not only that, but the firm may outsource other aspects of their business, such as HR, marketing, and communications to external agencies.
While outsourcing can save time, money, and HR burden, this interconnectedness does increase risk. For instance, if a company that produces sheet glass experiences a cyber breach and has details and contacts stolen, this presents a risk for the architecture firm and building company that were liaising with them at the time, as well as historic customer whose details are on record.
Gaining control over your connections with your third-party organizations and limiting severity of risk can greatly enhance your overall security standing and risk scoring. Risk from third parties isn’t a new concept. It is today’s level of interconnectedness that highlights the need for TPRM to prevent these links being exploited.
There are several benefits to implementing a TPRM solution and framework within your work environment. In this next section we will break down the key benefits and explain why they are relevant.
Improved Security
Through implementing and monitoring third-party risk management tools, organizations can secure themselves from risks and insulate themselves from events that occur within a third-parties jurisdiction. If a hacker is able to gain access to your third party’s network, then a lateral move to your organization is also likely. In the event a third party is hacked, there is the risk that your data will be compromised; this could lead to your operations being impacted and having to cease until the issue is resolved. Having a robust TPRM solution in place can help to manage and mitigate third party risk oversight and protect your business to improve your overall security posture.
Streamlined Operations
By improving your security posture and reducing the likelihood of downtime as a result of a security event, you are able to better utilize your time. This ensures that you can streamline operations, thereby making your organization more effective. By understanding the likelihood of downtime or a specific risk, you can build mitigation plans to circumvent any issues and return to business operations swiftly.
Reduced Costs
Outsourcing is one way that many businesses can reduce costs. However, if a provider suffers an attack, the cost of remediating this and the value of lost business could easily eclipse the savings made through outsourcing. By using TPRM to identify and manage risks before they affect your business can prevent these exorbitant costs. IBM announced in their 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report that a successful attack sets a company back by an average of USD 4.45 million.
Compliance Requirements
Some regulatory bodies have made vendor risk management a prerequisite in order for companies to be compliant and allowed to operate within a particular sector. Some of the best known of these includes GDPR and CCPA. Failure to comply with these requirements (and have the relevant TPRM solution in place) will often result in a fine. Other industry regulations such as NYDFS, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA take a different approach. They do not specifically ask for vendor risk management but do require compulsory risk assessments as part of the wider compliance process.
Protects Your Brand Image
It doesn’t always matter how severe a breach is, to a potential or current customer, any breach looks bad. Failure to assess and understand your vendors’ and third parties’ levels of risk can potentially expose you to data breaches and losses, which, in turn, harms your brand’s reputation. Companies that have experienced a breach, even if it isn’t directly their fault, can still damage customer confidence. As TPRM reduces the risk of a breach, it decreases the chance of your likelihood of brand image being adversely affected.
Like every established security space, third party risk management has a large and evolving market with a good number of effective vendors and solutions to choose from. That said, it can be difficult to identify the best solution for your needs. Before deciding or purchasing a solution, it is worth taking the time to understand and plan what you need from a TPRM solution. You should consider what you want to get out of it, how well it will integrate into your workflow and environment, its ease of onboarding, and how you can best use the information gained from its analysis. Depending on your sector, size, location, and industry, there will be different risks facing your organization. Common demands on a TPRM include ensuring business continuity, data management, supply chain, anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, and anti-bribery. Some solutions will be particularly suited to a certain sector or type of company.
Building an effective and successful third-party management risk solution takes time and expertise. This will involve a lot of planning on your IT team’s behalf in order to ensure relevant risks are identified and flagged effectively.
Here are some key features to look out for and take into consideration when making a purchase:
- Questionnaire Library: Some solutions will come with a built-in questionnaire library. This allows admins to gather data from vendors and ensure that they adhere to regulatory requirements and industry best practices.
- Customizable Questionnaires: In addition to having a questionnaire library, where teams can perform generic questionnaires, companies should be able to customize the questionnaire so that it is relevant to their industry. Some solutions allow you to edit existing questionnaires, some let you create entirely new ones from scratch, while others make both possible.
- Reporting: This is a key function of TPRM solutions; admins need to access and understand findings, then share these with relevant stakeholders. Reports should allow teams to make actionable decisions based on findings. This process should be quick to carry out, whilst providing a good level of detail and insight.
- Remediation Workflows: A solution that has a remediation workflow feature allows users to be able to request remediation from a specific third party based on intelligence from automated scanning and any completed questionnaires. Users will also be able to view current remediation requests, what risks were asked to be remediated, and timestamps of when the request was sent. This allows overall security to improve.
- Scalability: Ideally, your chosen solution should grow as you do. As companies mature, change, and adapt, they’re more likely to take on additional third-party vendors. It’s important that your TPRM solution can grow as you do, all the while maintaining coverage.
- Monitoring: Your TPRM solution needs to monitor risks and events constantly. After initial risk scans, security posture should be continuously monitored to confirm that there have been no further changes or developments.
- Automation: Automated or scheduled scans and remediation processes can reduce human tasks, whilst maintaining standards.
- Security Ratings: Through data analysis, relative scores can be calculated to put risks into perspective and prioritise responses.
- Fourth Party Discovery: This is a more advanced feature that will uncover the third parties of your third parties. While your organization may not deal with a fourth party directly, they can impact a third party, which could then impact you. While this may sound very far removed, lateral attacks mean that this is very possible. An example would be that multiple of your vendors use a particular cloud data storage solution; if this storage service becomes hacked and suffers downtime, not only will it impact your third parties, but it will impact your business as well.
- Accuracy: While less of a specific feature and more of an attribute, it’s important that your chosen third-party risk management solution is highly accurate. It’s important that the data it aggregates is accurate and that any security ratings used must adhere to fair and accurate standards of security ratings. Information should be independently verifiable and easily accessible.
- Confidentiality: Again, less of a feature and more of a trait but finding a TRPM vendor that takes confidentiality seriously is a must. All information from your business, your risks, how you operate, and the risks and operations of your associated third parties, must be kept in strict confidence. Ironically, if this information was shared, it could put your organization at risk.
Written By
Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.
Technical Review
Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.