Every company runs on vendors it doesn't control. The payroll provider that holds your employees' data, the cloud platform your product sits on, the analytics tool a single team signed up for last quarter. Each one is a door into your business, and you're accountable for what happens on the other side of it even though the vendor's security is out of your hands.
That's the tension at the heart of vendor risk management. You can't assess every vendor as if it were your most critical one, because you'd never finish, and you can't wave them all through, because the riskiest ones are where breaches and audit findings start. The teams that get this right aren't the ones with the biggest checklists. They're the ones who know which vendors deserve deep scrutiny, which need a light touch, and how to keep watching both after the contract is signed.
Getting there takes a repeatable program rather than a one-time scramble before a deal or an audit. This article walks through how vendor risk management works, including the types of risk to watch for, how to tier your vendors by exposure, the stages of running a VRM program from intake to offboarding, how it all maps to the compliance frameworks driving your deadlines, and tips for effective vendor risk management.
What is vendor risk management?
Vendor risk management is the set of processes a company uses to identify, evaluate, and reduce the risks that come with relying on outside vendors for products and services. A working VRM program covers six baseline risk categories (cybersecurity, compliance, operational, financial, reputational, and strategic) and runs continuously rather than as a one-time check during procurement.
VRM sits inside the broader practice of third-party risk management (TPRM). VRM focuses on the vendors that sell you a product or service. TPRM extends the same discipline to every outside party you work with, including partners, contractors, and agencies. Most companies start with VRM because vendors make up the bulk of their third-party exposure.
Your vendors also have vendors of their own, known as fourth parties from your vantage point. You hold no contract with them, but their failures can still reach your data and your operations, which is why mature programs keep the critical ones in scope.
{{cta_withimage20="/cta-blocks"}}
Benefits to expect from a VRM program
The primary purpose of VRM is not just security—it also adds a layer of resilience and predictability to your business operations that rely on vendors. Other noteworthy benefits are:
A clear view of vendor threats
A formalized VRM process gives you full visibility into your supply chain. Instead of guessing where your exposure sits, you can see which vendors introduce which risks and act on them deliberately rather than reactively.
Sharper risk prioritization
VRM helps you spend your attention and budget where they matter. By ranking vendor risks in order of impact, you keep your team and your capital focused on the threats that could truly hurt you rather than tied up in low-impact ones.
Stronger incident response
Once you understand the full scope of your vendor risk, you can build precise plans for the threats you've identified. Knowing which vendors hold what and where the weak points are turns incident response from a scramble into a rehearsed process.
An easier path to full TPRM
A well-built VRM program is the foundation for maturing into third-party risk management (TPRM). Once the discipline is in place for vendors, extending it to the rest of your third parties like agencies and consultants through broader TPRM frameworks is a smaller step than starting from scratch.
Simpler compliance and reputation management
Vendor risk management is a required piece of many compliance standards, especially in regulated industries governed by frameworks like HIPAA. A working program makes those requirements easier to meet and helps you hold your standing with customers and partners who expect you to manage the companies you rely on.
To fully reap these benefits, though, you need a well-defined vendor management policy (VMP) that incorporates the best tips and strategies for VRM.
The main types of vendor risk
Every mature program assesses the same six baseline categories, and naming them is the first step toward knowing where your exposure sits.
Cybersecurity risk
This is the one that keeps security teams up at night. A vendor with weak controls becomes an entry point into your environment, and once an attacker is inside a vendor you're connected to, they can move laterally into your own network. It's also the fastest-moving risk on this list, since a vendor that looked secure last quarter can be compromised today.
Compliance risk
When a vendor mishandles regulated data, the liability doesn't stay with the vendor. You can face a joint investigation, fines, and remediation costs even though the mistake wasn't yours. Frameworks like HIPAA and GDPR make this explicit, holding you responsible for the vendors that process data on your behalf.
Operational risk
Some vendors are woven so tightly into how you deliver that their downtime becomes yours. When a critical SaaS provider goes down during your busiest week, the impact lands on your customers and your revenue, not the vendor's. Continuity planning and clear service level expectations are how you keep a single vendor from turning into a single point of failure.
Financial risk
A vendor's balance sheet is your problem more often than it seems. A key supplier that files for bankruptcy mid-contract can leave you scrambling for a replacement, and hidden costs can surface long after the ink dries. These signals matter most for the vendors your operations lean on.
Reputational risk
Your customers rarely draw a clean line between your brand and the partners you choose, so a vendor's public controversy can quickly become your headline. Doing your homework on a vendor's track record and public standing helps you avoid inheriting someone else's crisis before you sign.
Strategic risk
The quietest risk is a vendor that simply stops moving in your direction. When one deprioritizes the product line you depend on or shifts its roadmap away from your needs, the relationship erodes without any single failure you can point to. Reviewing strategic fit at renewal keeps you from building on a foundation that's drifting. and by topics, I mean specific page title H1s. You know that one column that you have that writes out what the question is but also kind of what the H1 would be. I'm looking for whatever you're putting there to be in this view
How to tier your vendors so you assess the right ones deeply
Not every vendor deserves the same scrutiny. Treating them all equally either burns out your team or leaves your riskiest relationships without a real review, and usually both.
The fix is a tiering matrix built on two questions. How sensitive is the data and access the vendor holds, and how badly would your operations suffer if the vendor failed tomorrow? Cross those two axes and each vendor lands in one of four tiers that prescribes its assessment depth and reassessment cadence.
- Critical tier: A vendor that holds sensitive data or has deep access and is critical to the business warrants a full security review with evidence collection, a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report review, and reassessment every year or whenever an incident triggers one.
- High tier: A vendor with the same level of access but lower business criticality sits a step down, where a standard security questionnaire plus supporting evidence and a yearly reassessment does the job.
- Moderate tier: A vendor that holds no sensitive data or access but that the business still depends on needs only a review focused on availability and continuity, reassessed every 1 to 2 years.
- Low tier: Everything else, the vendors with neither sensitive access nor high criticality, needs no more than a lightweight attestation or self-serve check reviewed periodically.
Placing a vendor takes minutes once the matrix exists. A payroll provider that holds employee data and keeps people paid lands in the critical tier. A stock photo subscription with no integration into your environment lands in the low tier.
Depth then follows the tier. A review in the critical tier means a full vendor risk assessment. You collect a current SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report, read the exceptions, issue a questionnaire, verify remediation of anything material, and document it all in a vendor risk assessment report. A review in the low tier can be as light as a self-serve attestation. Cadence follows the tier as well, with critical vendors reassessed every year or whenever an incident triggers a review, and low-tier vendors on a lighter cycle.
You can run this scoring by hand in a spreadsheet, though most teams eventually adopt tooling that automates it. Vanta, for example, auto-scores vendors against an inherent risk rubric you define, using criteria like data types, business criticality, and integration access, so the tier assignment happens the moment a vendor enters your inventory.
How vendor risk management maps to your compliance frameworks
For most teams, a framework deadline is what makes vendor risk management mandatory. The major frameworks all expect you to manage the third parties that touch your data, and they say so in specific places.
*A note from Vanta. Vanta is not a law firm, and this article does not constitute or contain legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. When determining your obligations and compliance with respect to relevant laws and regulations, you should consult a licensed attorney.
The overlap works in your favor. A documented tiering rubric, completed assessments, and monitoring records satisfy the vendor management expectations of all four frameworks at once, so the evidence you produce for one audit carries into the next.
7 tips for effective vendor risk management
Below, we have compiled a set of VRM tips that can work for organizations in most industries:
1. Conduct thorough vendor due diligence (VDD)
Vendor due diligence is the process of collecting and evaluating vendor data to proactively spot areas of caution and determine whether a vendor fits your risk appetite. An elaborate VDD process can instantly filter out unfit vendors or inform the kind of controls you’ll implement before working with a specific vendor.
The process requires you to collect numerous data points and documents, such as:
- Financial reports
- Compliance audit reports
- Relevant certifications
- Security reviews
However, VDD can quickly become overwhelming without a formalized process because it involves repetitive data gathering and analysis for numerous vendors. An easy way to avoid oversight is to use a due diligence checklist, which helps standardize the process regardless of who’s in charge.
You should also have a well-established communication channel to make reporting easier. Share notable findings from your VDD report with relevant stakeholders in your organization, especially if you uncover risks that require an expert’s eye.
{{cta_webinar4="/cta-blocks"}} | Webinar: Vendor risk management
2. Formalize vendor risk assessments
Your vendor risk assessment (VRA) process can make or break the effectiveness of other VRM processes. The first step toward effective VRAs is to define your risk criteria. Doing so gives you a clear baseline for comparing different vendors and understanding the long-term implications of your partnerships.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to your risk criteria—you need to account for specific factors, such as:
- Your industry and operations
- Business criticality
- Types of data processed
- System access
- Your overall risk appetite
- Regulatory requirements
Then, you need to choose your risk assessment methodologies, preferably those that let you quantify risks and assign clear scores.
Similar to VDD, risk assessments can be quite resource-intensive because they require an abundance of data. To streamline the process, you can use pre-built VRA questionnaires designed to give you insight into risk types relevant to modern business ecosystems.
3. Maintain a robust vendor inventory
Once you’ve assessed vendor risks, you should add the vendors you partner with to a centralized inventory. This process brings the following advantages:
- Holistic overview of your vendor footprint
- Streamlined vendor management without disparate systems
- Easier risk prioritization
When adding vendors to your inventory, categorize them according to their risk tier. The process is more straightforward if you assign risk scores to vendors and define specific ranges for different risk tiers.
For example, if your total range is 1–20, your risk levels may look like this:
- Low: 1–7
- Medium: 8–13
- High: 14–17
- Extremely high (or Critical): 18–20
Your inventory can also include data like vendor status (e.g., active/on hold), business function impacted, and the date and outcome of the last security review.
4. Develop SaaS stack awareness
SaaS vendors warrant far greater scrutiny in your VRM program because they store sensitive data and/or have access to your systems. Due to the inherent cloud-based nature of their solutions, each vendor you bring through vendor onboarding expands your organization's potential cyber attack surface.
The solution is to carefully evaluate each SaaS vendor and their security posture. Look for stringent security measures and policies, compliance with relevant frameworks, and incident history before integrating your systems with their solutions.
Shadow IT is another important consideration here. Some of your team members might use specific software without the IT team's approval or knowledge, which compromises your organization’s awareness of all SaaS vulnerabilities.
The good news is that VRM platforms have been a game changer here. They come with detection features that help uncover all SaaS tools in your network automatically.
{{cta_withimage5="/cta-blocks"}}
5. Expand your due diligence to fourth-party vendors
Your vendors may also partner with third parties, which are referred to as fourth parties from your perspective. While you have no direct contractual connection with fourth parties, they still present a considerable risk for two reasons:
- It’s hard to identify all the fourth parties that can impact your organization.
- You don’t have control over fourth parties’ operations.
Your VRM program can help you understand and mitigate fourth-party risks to some extent. The first way to do this is through security questionnaires—you can include questions about your vendor’s approach to managing third-party risks and see if their vulnerabilities can be built into your systems.
You can also ask your vendor to list any third parties relevant to the scope of services provided to your organization and add those fourth parties to your inventory. This allows you to monitor them regularly and keep an eye out for potential risk events.
6. Reassess vendors as needed
Each vendor’s risk profile changes over time as their operations and third-party network evolve. As such, it’s imperative to stay on top of these changes through regular reassessments, commonly including annual reviews for high- and critical-risk vendors.
Such reassessments can be performed according to a predetermined schedule or triggered by incidents. Vendor reassessments typically shouldn’t take up much time because you already have data from the initial assessment in your system. Your primary focus should be defining what areas to review extensively, as well as gathering updated documents and compliance reports.
An efficiency tip here is to opt for a VRM platform with the following features:
- Integrated dashboard with relevant vendor data
- Real-time (or near real-time) data analysis for documentation provided
- Integrations with your existing systems
These functionalities will help you streamline reassessments and automate tedious tasks, saving your team considerable time and effort.
{{cta_testimonial5="/cta-blocks"}}
7. Develop and fine-tune backup plans
The importance of a carefully planned incident response plan cannot be overstated. Still, you may want to go a step further when facing critical risks that might make you end your partnership with a vendor. In such cases, you should have a clear contingency plan to protect your organization’s operations and security posture.
Ideally, you'll diversify your vendor portfolio to avoid relying too heavily on specific service providers. Consider planning ahead by maintaining a list of backup vendors you can partner with, and make sure your vendor offboarding process is ready to cut access and recover data cleanly when you do part ways.
Finally, it’s necessary to tweak your risk management strategy according to the changes in your risk profile. Doing so helps you avoid the reactive approach to adverse scenarios and gain more control over vendor risks.
Plan and implement a comprehensive VRM program with Vanta
If you need an end-to-end software solution to support your VRM program, Vanta can help. Vanta’s vendor risk management software offers automated risk management workflows and promotes faster due diligence and tracking, giving you time back for strategic security initiatives.
Vanta integrates with 400+ tools, ensuring you can complete your VRM workflows with minimum context switching. Some of Vanta’s core VRM features include:
- Centralized vendor inventory
- Streamlined VRAs with auto-scoring of vendor risk
- Discovery of shadow IT based on integrations
- Security and access review tracking
Watch our webinar to see Vanta in action. Or schedule a custom demo with our team today.
{{cta_simple5="/cta-blocks"}}
Introduction to TPRM
What is vendor risk management (VRM)?
Looking to save up to 50% of time with AI-powered security reviews?
Every company runs on vendors it doesn't control. The payroll provider that holds your employees' data, the cloud platform your product sits on, the analytics tool a single team signed up for last quarter. Each one is a door into your business, and you're accountable for what happens on the other side of it even though the vendor's security is out of your hands.
That's the tension at the heart of vendor risk management. You can't assess every vendor as if it were your most critical one, because you'd never finish, and you can't wave them all through, because the riskiest ones are where breaches and audit findings start. The teams that get this right aren't the ones with the biggest checklists. They're the ones who know which vendors deserve deep scrutiny, which need a light touch, and how to keep watching both after the contract is signed.
Getting there takes a repeatable program rather than a one-time scramble before a deal or an audit. This article walks through how vendor risk management works, including the types of risk to watch for, how to tier your vendors by exposure, the stages of running a VRM program from intake to offboarding, how it all maps to the compliance frameworks driving your deadlines, and tips for effective vendor risk management.
What is vendor risk management?
Vendor risk management is the set of processes a company uses to identify, evaluate, and reduce the risks that come with relying on outside vendors for products and services. A working VRM program covers six baseline risk categories (cybersecurity, compliance, operational, financial, reputational, and strategic) and runs continuously rather than as a one-time check during procurement.
VRM sits inside the broader practice of third-party risk management (TPRM). VRM focuses on the vendors that sell you a product or service. TPRM extends the same discipline to every outside party you work with, including partners, contractors, and agencies. Most companies start with VRM because vendors make up the bulk of their third-party exposure.
Your vendors also have vendors of their own, known as fourth parties from your vantage point. You hold no contract with them, but their failures can still reach your data and your operations, which is why mature programs keep the critical ones in scope.
{{cta_withimage20="/cta-blocks"}}
Benefits to expect from a VRM program
The primary purpose of VRM is not just security—it also adds a layer of resilience and predictability to your business operations that rely on vendors. Other noteworthy benefits are:
A clear view of vendor threats
A formalized VRM process gives you full visibility into your supply chain. Instead of guessing where your exposure sits, you can see which vendors introduce which risks and act on them deliberately rather than reactively.
Sharper risk prioritization
VRM helps you spend your attention and budget where they matter. By ranking vendor risks in order of impact, you keep your team and your capital focused on the threats that could truly hurt you rather than tied up in low-impact ones.
Stronger incident response
Once you understand the full scope of your vendor risk, you can build precise plans for the threats you've identified. Knowing which vendors hold what and where the weak points are turns incident response from a scramble into a rehearsed process.
An easier path to full TPRM
A well-built VRM program is the foundation for maturing into third-party risk management (TPRM). Once the discipline is in place for vendors, extending it to the rest of your third parties like agencies and consultants through broader TPRM frameworks is a smaller step than starting from scratch.
Simpler compliance and reputation management
Vendor risk management is a required piece of many compliance standards, especially in regulated industries governed by frameworks like HIPAA. A working program makes those requirements easier to meet and helps you hold your standing with customers and partners who expect you to manage the companies you rely on.
To fully reap these benefits, though, you need a well-defined vendor management policy (VMP) that incorporates the best tips and strategies for VRM.
The main types of vendor risk
Every mature program assesses the same six baseline categories, and naming them is the first step toward knowing where your exposure sits.
Cybersecurity risk
This is the one that keeps security teams up at night. A vendor with weak controls becomes an entry point into your environment, and once an attacker is inside a vendor you're connected to, they can move laterally into your own network. It's also the fastest-moving risk on this list, since a vendor that looked secure last quarter can be compromised today.
Compliance risk
When a vendor mishandles regulated data, the liability doesn't stay with the vendor. You can face a joint investigation, fines, and remediation costs even though the mistake wasn't yours. Frameworks like HIPAA and GDPR make this explicit, holding you responsible for the vendors that process data on your behalf.
Operational risk
Some vendors are woven so tightly into how you deliver that their downtime becomes yours. When a critical SaaS provider goes down during your busiest week, the impact lands on your customers and your revenue, not the vendor's. Continuity planning and clear service level expectations are how you keep a single vendor from turning into a single point of failure.
Financial risk
A vendor's balance sheet is your problem more often than it seems. A key supplier that files for bankruptcy mid-contract can leave you scrambling for a replacement, and hidden costs can surface long after the ink dries. These signals matter most for the vendors your operations lean on.
Reputational risk
Your customers rarely draw a clean line between your brand and the partners you choose, so a vendor's public controversy can quickly become your headline. Doing your homework on a vendor's track record and public standing helps you avoid inheriting someone else's crisis before you sign.
Strategic risk
The quietest risk is a vendor that simply stops moving in your direction. When one deprioritizes the product line you depend on or shifts its roadmap away from your needs, the relationship erodes without any single failure you can point to. Reviewing strategic fit at renewal keeps you from building on a foundation that's drifting. and by topics, I mean specific page title H1s. You know that one column that you have that writes out what the question is but also kind of what the H1 would be. I'm looking for whatever you're putting there to be in this view
How to tier your vendors so you assess the right ones deeply
Not every vendor deserves the same scrutiny. Treating them all equally either burns out your team or leaves your riskiest relationships without a real review, and usually both.
The fix is a tiering matrix built on two questions. How sensitive is the data and access the vendor holds, and how badly would your operations suffer if the vendor failed tomorrow? Cross those two axes and each vendor lands in one of four tiers that prescribes its assessment depth and reassessment cadence.
- Critical tier: A vendor that holds sensitive data or has deep access and is critical to the business warrants a full security review with evidence collection, a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report review, and reassessment every year or whenever an incident triggers one.
- High tier: A vendor with the same level of access but lower business criticality sits a step down, where a standard security questionnaire plus supporting evidence and a yearly reassessment does the job.
- Moderate tier: A vendor that holds no sensitive data or access but that the business still depends on needs only a review focused on availability and continuity, reassessed every 1 to 2 years.
- Low tier: Everything else, the vendors with neither sensitive access nor high criticality, needs no more than a lightweight attestation or self-serve check reviewed periodically.
Placing a vendor takes minutes once the matrix exists. A payroll provider that holds employee data and keeps people paid lands in the critical tier. A stock photo subscription with no integration into your environment lands in the low tier.
Depth then follows the tier. A review in the critical tier means a full vendor risk assessment. You collect a current SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report, read the exceptions, issue a questionnaire, verify remediation of anything material, and document it all in a vendor risk assessment report. A review in the low tier can be as light as a self-serve attestation. Cadence follows the tier as well, with critical vendors reassessed every year or whenever an incident triggers a review, and low-tier vendors on a lighter cycle.
You can run this scoring by hand in a spreadsheet, though most teams eventually adopt tooling that automates it. Vanta, for example, auto-scores vendors against an inherent risk rubric you define, using criteria like data types, business criticality, and integration access, so the tier assignment happens the moment a vendor enters your inventory.
How vendor risk management maps to your compliance frameworks
For most teams, a framework deadline is what makes vendor risk management mandatory. The major frameworks all expect you to manage the third parties that touch your data, and they say so in specific places.
*A note from Vanta. Vanta is not a law firm, and this article does not constitute or contain legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. When determining your obligations and compliance with respect to relevant laws and regulations, you should consult a licensed attorney.
The overlap works in your favor. A documented tiering rubric, completed assessments, and monitoring records satisfy the vendor management expectations of all four frameworks at once, so the evidence you produce for one audit carries into the next.
7 tips for effective vendor risk management
Below, we have compiled a set of VRM tips that can work for organizations in most industries:
1. Conduct thorough vendor due diligence (VDD)
Vendor due diligence is the process of collecting and evaluating vendor data to proactively spot areas of caution and determine whether a vendor fits your risk appetite. An elaborate VDD process can instantly filter out unfit vendors or inform the kind of controls you’ll implement before working with a specific vendor.
The process requires you to collect numerous data points and documents, such as:
- Financial reports
- Compliance audit reports
- Relevant certifications
- Security reviews
However, VDD can quickly become overwhelming without a formalized process because it involves repetitive data gathering and analysis for numerous vendors. An easy way to avoid oversight is to use a due diligence checklist, which helps standardize the process regardless of who’s in charge.
You should also have a well-established communication channel to make reporting easier. Share notable findings from your VDD report with relevant stakeholders in your organization, especially if you uncover risks that require an expert’s eye.
{{cta_webinar4="/cta-blocks"}} | Webinar: Vendor risk management
2. Formalize vendor risk assessments
Your vendor risk assessment (VRA) process can make or break the effectiveness of other VRM processes. The first step toward effective VRAs is to define your risk criteria. Doing so gives you a clear baseline for comparing different vendors and understanding the long-term implications of your partnerships.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to your risk criteria—you need to account for specific factors, such as:
- Your industry and operations
- Business criticality
- Types of data processed
- System access
- Your overall risk appetite
- Regulatory requirements
Then, you need to choose your risk assessment methodologies, preferably those that let you quantify risks and assign clear scores.
Similar to VDD, risk assessments can be quite resource-intensive because they require an abundance of data. To streamline the process, you can use pre-built VRA questionnaires designed to give you insight into risk types relevant to modern business ecosystems.
3. Maintain a robust vendor inventory
Once you’ve assessed vendor risks, you should add the vendors you partner with to a centralized inventory. This process brings the following advantages:
- Holistic overview of your vendor footprint
- Streamlined vendor management without disparate systems
- Easier risk prioritization
When adding vendors to your inventory, categorize them according to their risk tier. The process is more straightforward if you assign risk scores to vendors and define specific ranges for different risk tiers.
For example, if your total range is 1–20, your risk levels may look like this:
- Low: 1–7
- Medium: 8–13
- High: 14–17
- Extremely high (or Critical): 18–20
Your inventory can also include data like vendor status (e.g., active/on hold), business function impacted, and the date and outcome of the last security review.
4. Develop SaaS stack awareness
SaaS vendors warrant far greater scrutiny in your VRM program because they store sensitive data and/or have access to your systems. Due to the inherent cloud-based nature of their solutions, each vendor you bring through vendor onboarding expands your organization's potential cyber attack surface.
The solution is to carefully evaluate each SaaS vendor and their security posture. Look for stringent security measures and policies, compliance with relevant frameworks, and incident history before integrating your systems with their solutions.
Shadow IT is another important consideration here. Some of your team members might use specific software without the IT team's approval or knowledge, which compromises your organization’s awareness of all SaaS vulnerabilities.
The good news is that VRM platforms have been a game changer here. They come with detection features that help uncover all SaaS tools in your network automatically.
{{cta_withimage5="/cta-blocks"}}
5. Expand your due diligence to fourth-party vendors
Your vendors may also partner with third parties, which are referred to as fourth parties from your perspective. While you have no direct contractual connection with fourth parties, they still present a considerable risk for two reasons:
- It’s hard to identify all the fourth parties that can impact your organization.
- You don’t have control over fourth parties’ operations.
Your VRM program can help you understand and mitigate fourth-party risks to some extent. The first way to do this is through security questionnaires—you can include questions about your vendor’s approach to managing third-party risks and see if their vulnerabilities can be built into your systems.
You can also ask your vendor to list any third parties relevant to the scope of services provided to your organization and add those fourth parties to your inventory. This allows you to monitor them regularly and keep an eye out for potential risk events.
6. Reassess vendors as needed
Each vendor’s risk profile changes over time as their operations and third-party network evolve. As such, it’s imperative to stay on top of these changes through regular reassessments, commonly including annual reviews for high- and critical-risk vendors.
Such reassessments can be performed according to a predetermined schedule or triggered by incidents. Vendor reassessments typically shouldn’t take up much time because you already have data from the initial assessment in your system. Your primary focus should be defining what areas to review extensively, as well as gathering updated documents and compliance reports.
An efficiency tip here is to opt for a VRM platform with the following features:
- Integrated dashboard with relevant vendor data
- Real-time (or near real-time) data analysis for documentation provided
- Integrations with your existing systems
These functionalities will help you streamline reassessments and automate tedious tasks, saving your team considerable time and effort.
{{cta_testimonial5="/cta-blocks"}}
7. Develop and fine-tune backup plans
The importance of a carefully planned incident response plan cannot be overstated. Still, you may want to go a step further when facing critical risks that might make you end your partnership with a vendor. In such cases, you should have a clear contingency plan to protect your organization’s operations and security posture.
Ideally, you'll diversify your vendor portfolio to avoid relying too heavily on specific service providers. Consider planning ahead by maintaining a list of backup vendors you can partner with, and make sure your vendor offboarding process is ready to cut access and recover data cleanly when you do part ways.
Finally, it’s necessary to tweak your risk management strategy according to the changes in your risk profile. Doing so helps you avoid the reactive approach to adverse scenarios and gain more control over vendor risks.
Plan and implement a comprehensive VRM program with Vanta
If you need an end-to-end software solution to support your VRM program, Vanta can help. Vanta’s vendor risk management software offers automated risk management workflows and promotes faster due diligence and tracking, giving you time back for strategic security initiatives.
Vanta integrates with 400+ tools, ensuring you can complete your VRM workflows with minimum context switching. Some of Vanta’s core VRM features include:
- Centralized vendor inventory
- Streamlined VRAs with auto-scoring of vendor risk
- Discovery of shadow IT based on integrations
- Security and access review tracking
Watch our webinar to see Vanta in action. Or schedule a custom demo with our team today.
{{cta_simple5="/cta-blocks"}}
Explore more TPRM articles
Introduction to TPRM
Vendor lifecycle management
Vendor risk assessment
Running a VRM program
Regulatory compliance and industry standards
Get started with TPRM
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Vanta in Action: Vendor Risk Management
Vendor security reviews can be manual and time-consuming, draining security teams of precious hours. Vanta’s Vendor Risk Management solution changes that, automating and streamlining security reviews so that you can spend less time on repetitive work and more time strengthening your security posture. Curious to see what it looks like?
10 important questions to add to your security questionnaire [with examples]
Use these 10 vendor security questionnaire questions to assess compliance, uncover risks, and evaluate third-party vendors before onboarding.
