Managing the vendor remediation process is no small feat. While on the surface, it might seem like the bulk of the heavy lifting is done once you complete your initial assessment, you (and every other security team on the planet) know this couldn’t be further from the truth.
After all, if your team doesn’t constantly track remediation efforts and validate corrective actions, how else are you supposed to ensure vendors effectively mitigate the risks you identified?
No, managing third-party risks doesn’t stop at identifying them. True, efficient remediation requires careful follow-through, vendor collaboration, and a standardized procedure for tracking progress and remediation activity.
The primary problem is that many security teams lack a centralized system, and this lack of visibility makes it nearly impossible to track whether vendors are actually fixing their security gaps. It’s not uncommon for analysts to find themselves buried in spreadsheets, chasing vendors for updates, and struggling to validate the status of previously identified risks.
These remediation inefficiencies can snowball into several serious problems. At the very least, this lack of visibility can be annoying and cause delays in your team’s mitigation efforts. However, poor vendor remediation can also lead to prolonged risk exposure and increase your organization’s likelihood of suffering a crippling data breach or compliance penalties.
This article is part three in a five-part blog series solving the toughest challenges security teams face during third-party risk assessments. We’ve already covered vendor responsiveness and evidence analysis. This post will show how UpGuard Vendor Risk and its AI-powered Security Profiles simplify remediation management.
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: Poor Visibility and Vendor Communication
Let’s set the scene:
You work at a large financial institution, and your security team recently completed the initial assessments for your organization’s top three cloud service providers. While conducting these assessments, your team uncovered several critical risks. Now, you need to ensure these vendors actually remediate the risks you flagged—or prove they have compensating controls in place that mitigate the impact.
But weeks have passed, and you’ve heard nothing. No updates, no confirmation, no clarity. You have no idea if these risks are still hanging over your head or if the vendors have taken action.
Without a centralized system to track remediation activity, the pressure is mounting. You’re drowning in email chains, scattered spreadsheets, and endless follow-up tasks that only seem to add to the chaos. At worst, your messages and calls go unanswered, and at best, promises to “circle back” never seem to materialize.
You and your team are starting to question whether these vendors are even capable of adequately managing security gaps. It’s no secret that every unresolved risk leaves your organization vulnerable. This lack of transparency also increases your team’s frustration and corrodes any remaining confidence in the process.
Is your organization’s risk exposure growing? With no clear visibility into the status of your remediation requests, it’s hard to tell.
“The Problem I have is having to constantly chase people down as they don’t reply to my emails asking for updates. This makes everything frustrating.”
Taken from Reddit r/cybersecurity
The Solution: Tracking Remediation Requests with UpGuard
Tracking and managing remediation activity is one of the most frustrating parts of the vendor risk assessment process. But what if it didn’t have to be?
What if your team could gain control over the entire remediation process? What if you could even help your vendors speed up their mitigation efforts?
By harnessing the power of UpGuard Vendor Risk, you can turn these “what ifs” into reality.
UpGuard’s AI-Powered Security Profiles transform remediation management into a seamless, transparent process.
Here’s how:
1. Centralized Tracking and Automated Progress Indicators
You can solve most inefficiencies in the vendor remediation process by increasing your team’s visibility. The best way to do this is by developing a centralized system to track remediation activity and the status of identified risks. This system will also help your team prioritize risks and always be aware of critical risks it’s currently facing.
Now, developing a centralized system by yourself can be challenging, especially if your security team is already shouldering a mountain of unresolved issues. Enter: UpGuard.
UpGuard Vendor Risk streamlines the remediation process by giving security teams real-time visibility into risk status, vendor responses, corrective actions, and supporting evidence—all within a single platform to track, manage, and validate remediation efforts efficiently.
Gone are the days of using isolated spreadsheets to manage individual remediation tasks and relying on disparate communication channels to track vendor responses and activity. Instead, receive real-time insights into where each vendor stands in the remediation process.
2. Prioritized Risk Mitigation
Another way to increase remediation speed and efficiency is by prioritizing risks. What risks should you and your vendors focus on remediating first? Which will have the largest impact on your security posture?
Without a clear roadmap for prioritizing risks, your team (and your vendors) can be left spinning their wheels as they try to decide where to focus efforts.
UpGuard Vendor Risk dissolves this hurdle by automatically prioritizing identified risks by criticality. This powerful feature ensures your team addresses high-impact issues first, and can easily see exactly how many critical risks there are, the status of each, and which ones are being actively remediated.
3. Clear Vendor Guidance
Risk remediation is challenging for vendors, too. It’s important to remember this when submitting remediation requests. The best vendor relationships operate based on improvement through collaboration. You and your vendors should want to help each other improve your organization’s security.
UpGuard Vendor Risk gives security teams the tools to actively assist vendors during remediation. The UpGuard platform (when applicable) presents remediation guidance for most scanning risks. You can share these steps with your vendors to reduce confusion and delays.
The UpGuard platform also makes it possible to collaborate and communicate with vendors directly within the product. This means your entire team can easily see where vendors stand on specific issues and ensures no communication gets overlooked or stuck in someone’s inbox. UpGuard’s comprehensive tracking and documentation can also be helpful if you ever need to go back and provide evidence that a particular risk was or was not remediated.
4. Evidence Validation
Confidence is another critical component of a well-oiled remediation process. You and your analysts need to trust that the process is working. The best way to instill and grow this confidence is by validating the success of each remediation attempt.
UpGuard Vendor Risk automatically accompanies each completed remediation step with verified documentation, leaving a comprehensive audit trail. This will not only increase your and your team's confidence, but it will also improve the efficiency of your stakeholder reports and show your executive team that your remediation process is working.
Harnessing UpGuard, you can explore and report on your company’s risk level across your vendor ecosystem. Which of your vendors are introducing the most risk? Which remediate risks the quickest?
These insights can be great fuel for decision-making, especially if you want to make vendor decisions based on how seriously they take their cybersecurity. On the other hand, using UpGuard you can quickly showcase your own team’s effort to improve your organization’s security posture. With a few clicks, you can drill down into specific risks, filtering by time period, severity, portfolio, vendor tier, and more.
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.
Overcome Remediation Hurdles With UpGuard Vendor Risk
Ready to revolutionize your team’s remediation process?
Book your free UpGuard demo today, and watch our recent AI webinar to learn more about UpGuard’s AI features.
This article was part three of our five-part blog series covering security teams' toughest challenges. In our next article, we’ll explore how your team can streamline reporting and deliver actionable insights faster than ever before.
