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In today’s interconnected business world, organizations exchange data with vendors and external partners. They rely on third-party relationships to extend their workforce and perform specialized services, like payroll or data processing. This extended workforce often requires access to organizational resources such as shared tools, applications or data sets to provide critical services.
This access opens companies up to increased risk of cyber threats because their defenses are only as strong as their weakest link: If your suppliers’ defenses are more porous than your organization’s are, this introduces greater risk to your organization. In fact, according to recent research by The Ponemon Institute and Mastercard’s RiskRecon, 59% of respondents indicated that their organizations have experienced a data breach caused by one of their third parties.
So when it comes to assessing third-party access risks, how do you set yourself up for audit success? An audit is always a look at what happened in the past, but it can provide insights so that history does not repeat itself. While you may have to perform annual audits for any number of industry or regulatory compliance reasons, your third-party audit can also be an opportunity to get actionable information to help you mitigate the additional risk introduced by the extended workforce.
In general, a third-party risk management audit will look into the effectiveness of your access management program. It will also make a checklist of regulatory guidelines that the business and its third-party vendors must comply with. The end result is likely a lengthy report with page after page of tactical recommendations without any sort of unifying narrative.
Before setting your auditors loose, you should establish a few “big questions” that can provide programmatic guidance.
One way to start is by using a people-focused lens, rather than just a compliance-focused lens. Who are the people and what are they doing? This may seem counterintuitive, but rules and regulations exist because companies were not protecting people’s data.
So ask yourself:
Who are all of these people? What external entity do they belong to? Who is their sponsor internally? Your audit can give you a baseline of:
What are all these people doing with their access?
What are the behaviors we need them to take to meet our compliance goals?
A third-party risk management (TPRM) audit will look into the effectiveness of your current program. It will also make a checklist of regulatory guidelines that the business and its third-party vendors must comply with. So how can you make it actionable– addressing the right risks and becoming more compliant and secure?
With actionable audit results in hand, you’ll be enabled to prioritize compliance challenges and develop a roadmap for reducing third-party risks to ace your next audit and improve your security posture.
To do this, you need to ensure that all of your users – including third-party workers – have the appropriate guardrails and that your certifiers have the data they need to make good access decisions. And to do all of this on a consistent basis.
Until now, there haven’t been many purpose-built tools for managing third-party access. This has been a challenge because:
Saviynt Third-Party Access Governance (TPAG) provides complete third-party identity management. Start the relationship off securely with seamless onboarding, then simplify lifecycle management with automation and AI-driven identity intelligence. Manage third-party identities in the same system as your badged employees and make continuous compliance a reality in your organization.
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