An organization is rarely in business alone. In addition to internal teams and employees, businesses of all sizes and in all industries depend on third-party vendors, service providers and partners for getting things done efficiently.
Unfortunately, when working with teams outside of your organization, you’re exposed to a certain level of risk. These risks fall into a variety of categories, including:
- Strategic Risk: Risks associated with business decisions or failure.
- Reputation Risk: Risks that arise due to negative public opinion or unhappy customers.
- Operational Risk: Risks occurring from inefficient operations.
- Transaction Risk: Risks from product or service delivery.
- Compliance Risk: Risks occurring from law or regulation violations.
- Information Security Risk: Risks associated with unauthorized use or disclosure of sensitive information.
If a third party has access to your customers’ information or your company’s sensitive data, you need to ensure you’re doing all you can to properly protect yourself from each and every type of risk during every stage of the relationship.
Managing third-party risk manually quickly becomes impossible; when you’re overseeing multiple vendors and partners, the number of users, interactions and software gaps escalates exponentially–seemingly within days. Odyssey’s Third-Party Risk Management framework can help provide the necessary tools to automate those tricky situations and prevent your sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands.
Here’s how you can use automation to control and reduce third-party risk.
Improve scalability without increasing cost.
As your business ecosystem continues to grow, you’ll likely have more and more vendors you need to manage. Most organizations don’t have an in-house team capable of manually overseeing each unique risk associated with every vendor.
To save time, employees may adopt a one-size-fits-all approach for assessing risk. Unfortunately, each vendor will bring their own unique challenges to risk management, making a cookie-cutter assessment inefficient.
Automation streamlines this process to ensure you’re properly protected by collecting and analyzing all your vendors’ data at once to provide you with an accurate assessment and ranking of the vendors who pose the greatest risk to your organization. You’ll discover these risks sooner and be able to focus your risk management efforts in the right place. For example, instead of worrying about all 200 of your vendors, you can target the 10 or 12 that pose the greatest risk.
Automation also enables your organization to safely grow without needing to bring on new staff. Because an automation tool can quickly and efficiently analyze multiple vendors simultaneously, your best employees can focus their time on reducing risk––not identifying it.
Decrease risk response time by enhancing collaboration.
Manually identifying and solving third-party risks requires constant vigilance. Not only do employees need to be “always-on” in order to discover an issue is present, but they must communicate the problem and work through a solution. During this time, the risk may grow or become more threatening.
Adopting an automation tool allows organizations to respond to risk in a timely manner. It also delivers a more comprehensive view of each vendor’s risk, enabling teams to make more informed decisions on how to reduce the risk effectively and efficiently.
Using automation to manage vendor risk is also beneficial to the third-party organizations you work with. You’re able to share data, resources, and easily collaborate to discover and resolve risk. Automating risk management processes means both companies involved can respond quickly to ensure the threat is taken care of––often before they even manifest themselves.
Using the Odyssey Third-Party Risk Management Framework
The Odyssey Third-Party Risk Management Framework helps you control and oversee risk at every stage of the vendor relationship. Using surveys and reviews, Odyssey enables you to tier vendors based on perceived risk and coordinate periodic assessments to give you a complete risk overview of each vendor.
Odyssey also uses a unique dashboard to provide users with a quick glance of all vendors and their associated risk. These quick updates ensure your organization is never blindsided by a data breach, improving your data’s safety and your company’s value.