Third-party governance involves the processes and controls an organization uses to manage its relationships with external parties such as vendors, suppliers, and service providers.

It's critical to ensure that these outsiders don't introduce any security issues and vulnerabilities. For instance, when a freelancer is onboarded into the system, they are not given access to sensitive data that is not needed in their day-to-day work.

To do this, third-party governance and risk management solutions must be in place.

Effective third-party management/governance requires carefully assessing relationships and implementing appropriate controls to mitigate external risks. This may include conducting due diligence on potential third-party partners, negotiating contracts, clearly defining responsibilities and performance expectations, and monitoring third-party partners closely.

Third-party identity management (TPIM) is a vital part of governance. This involves managing the lifecycle of third-party accounts, including onboarding, provisioning, access management, and offboarding. It also uses authorization and authentication technologies, like multi-factor authentication (MFA), to lessen the risk of hackers compromising the system through third-party accounts.

Applying rigorous identity security & governance to your external and third-party users is a critical step in mitigating risks of a cyber attack or compliance violation.

As organizations rely on outside partners, suppliers and contractors to perform critical functions, they also open the door to increased risk for companies of unauthorized access to sensitive data or systems that could be compromised.

The problem is that third parties accessing your system are beyond your control. They can easily share their credentials (willingly or accidentally) with hackers, who can then gain entry into your system. 

External identity management can't prevent this from happening. However, it can prevent the hacker from doing more damage by limiting where they can move inside the network. You can also terminate the account, rendering it useless to the attacker.

In short, ensuring proper third-party access governance will protect your company from potential breaches while helping you stay ahead of the competition.  

Strengthening secure access is perhaps the key challenge with third-party access control. Companies have minimal control over how external third-parties protect their login credentials—and no guarantee they can access your network from a secure workstation.

Thus, credentials must be regularly rotated and supported with other methods like MFA to boost security.

Monitoring third parties access is critical but time-consuming work. Unfortunately, not doing this exposes you to risks you may not be aware of, and if you do detect something suspicious, you need a way to enforce immediate action.

Saviynt helps resolve these issues with robust risk assessment during onboarding, data protection, continuous monitoring, privileged access management and seamless third-party access without a VPN.