All security professionals know third-party risk management doesn’t stop after one risk assessment.
What about the next vendor? Or the future risks the vendors you’ve already evaluated will inevitably endure?
While completing even a single risk assessment can feel like an arduous journey when done manually, all successful TPRM programs continue long after assessment.
However, scaling and maturing a TPRM program to cover your entire vendor ecosystem can introduce several new layers and complexities—ones that are impossible to manage manually.
How are you supposed to monitor all your vendors simultaneously? How could you possibly keep track of each assessment cycle in a spreadsheet? How is your program supposed to remain effective as your organization’s third-party network expands exponentially?
What if you could take all the efficiencies we’ve explored throughout this blog series—from vendor responsiveness and evidence analysis to remediation management and report writing—and scale your TPRM program to stay ahead of threats while reducing complexity?
Seems too good to be true, right? Well, think again.
This is the final part of our blog series solving the toughest challenges security teams face during the risk assessment process. Keep reading to learn how you can deploy UpGuard Vendor Risk and its suite of powerful AI features to eradicate tedious manual tasks and supercharge your program.
5 Major Third-Party Risk Management Challenges Fixed with AI
Navigate this crowded landscape by diving into the top five challenges in third-party risk management and explaining how the right AI-driven solution can make all the difference.
The Problem: Manual Work Decays a Security Team’s Ability to Scale and a Scenario Every Team Dreads
Let’s set the scene one final time:
Over the last few months, your organization has significantly expanded its vendor ecosystem. Your once manageable network of third-party partners has multiplied into a complex web of diverse relationships, each with its own risk profile. Vendor risk assessments have always been a bottleneck for your team, but now, they are nearly impossible.
How do you prioritize which vendors need attention when you have so many to assess?
In addition, scoping the proper requirements for each vendor relationship has led to inconsistencies in your team’s assessment process. Your team has assessed some vendors thoroughly, but others are subjected to more surface-level scrutiny. You fear this inconsistency is causing your team to miss risks and create gaps in your organization’s security posture.
To make matters worse, your organization doesn’t have an ongoing monitoring program, so you don’t know what risks have emerged between assessments.
Overall, this lack of scalability is not just slowing your team down—it’s also undermining your organization’s ability to protect itself. Critical vendors are essentially left unchecked for most of the year, and emerging risks are unmanaged.
“We were relying on spreadsheets, emails, and a lot of back-and-forths to assess vendor security. It was slow, inconsistent, and frankly, a nightmare to manage at scale.”
-Andrew Morton, Head of IT, GRC, and Assurance at Chemist Warehouse
The Solution: Eradicating Manual Work and Scaling Your TPRM Program with UpGuard’s AI
We understand that scaling a risk assessment program can feel like an impossible task. But with the right tools, it doesn’t have to be.
UpGuard Vendor Risk equips security teams like yours with everything they need to prioritize, standardize, and continuously monitor their vendor ecosystem.
1. Centralized vendor management
The first step to scaling a vendor risk management program is developing a centralized hub to oversee all of your third-party relationships. You need complete oversight over your third-party network to react quickly to emerging risks and prioritize assessments and other tasks appropriately. You could develop such a hub manually, but be aware that this will take significant time and be painstakingly tedious. If you want to avoid all this manual work and start taking control of your vendor network fast, you could also harness AI and the world's leading TPRM solution.
UpGuard Vendor Risk is a comprehensive third-party risk management platform that simplifies the lives of security teams through continuous vendor insights, 360-degree assessments, and efficient AI-powered workflows. Within one platform, users can oversee, manage, and evaluate the status of all their vendors, assessments, and remediation activities. Users can also instantly drill down into the security posture of specific vendors with UpGuard’s AI-powered Security Profiles.
2. Vendor tiering and tagging
Nothing makes prioritizing assessments easier than understanding which vendors pose the greatest risk to your organization. With UpGuard Vendor Risk, you can instantly organize your entire vendor network by criticality or Security Rating. By doing so, you’ll create a clear assessment roadmap and know which vendors your team should start evaluating first.
3. Always-on monitoring
Another hallmark of a successful TPRM program is continuous security monitoring. UpGuard Vendor Risk is always on, making it easy for security teams to monitor all their vendors simultaneously around the clock.
UpGuard uses proprietary scanning technology to scan over thirteen million vendors daily. Better yet, the platform automatically notifies you when these scans flag new risks and security developments affecting one of your vendors. Insights related to a specific vendor are also automatically aggregated into that vendor’s UpGuard Security Profile.
5. Assessment scheduling and automatic reminders
Many security teams use spreadsheets to track assessment schedules. However, manual spreadsheets are inefficient and prone to human error. UpGuard Vendor Risk eliminates these spreadsheets and automates assessment schedules so none of your vendors fall through the cracks. The platform also sends users automatic reminders when it’s time to evaluate the security posture of specific vendors.
6. Transparency across your TPRM program
When it comes time to scale, transparency is paramount, and with UpGuard Vendor Risk, you can make transparency a core feature of your TPRM program.
Gain complete visibility into all your risk management activities, vendor assessments, and overall security posture in real time. This advanced transparency is crucial for organizations and security teams to make informed decisions and manage risks across their third-party network.
The UpGuard platform also enables security teams to generate comprehensive, stakeholder-ready reports in less time than ever before. These reports highlight emerging risks, security areas that require ongoing attention, and changes in security posture across your supply chain, including measurable improvements and the work your team did to facilitate this improvement. With a few clicks, you can customize these reports and deliver them to key business stakeholders, fostering trust and ensuring everyone in your organization is aligned.
7. Trend tracking over time
When you combine ongoing vendor risk monitoring with trend tracking, you start to be able to predict potential security risks before they emerge. UpGuard Vendor Risk gives security teams this power by automatically tracking vendor trends and the overall performance of their TPRM programs over time.
This tracking empowers security teams to measure the impact of their remediation efforts and make data-driven decisions to enhance their security strategy year after year.
5 Major Third-Party Risk Management Challenges Fixed with AI
Navigate this crowded landscape by diving into the top five challenges in third-party risk management and explaining how the right AI-driven solution can make all the difference.
Achieving Ongoing TPRM Success With UpGuard Vendor Risk
Ready to fully embrace the future of third-party risk management?
Book your free UpGuard demo today, and check out our exclusive, on-demand AI webinar to learn what UpGuard’s AI features can do for your security team.
This article was part five of our five-part blog series covering the toughest challenges security teams face.
Missed the first four parts? Read them here:
