Vendor risk assessments are a critical component of third-party risk management programs. When you use third-party solutions and services, you should understand the risks they can bring.
Your vendors’ risks are your own. These risks may relate to cybersecurity, compliance, operations, finance, or reputation. Conducting assessments can help you to reveal and remediate these risks throughout the vendor lifecycle.
Vendor risk assessments let your organization proactively identify and mitigate third-party risks to be better prepared when incidents do occur. Well-managed assessments strengthen vendor relationships, demonstrate proper due diligence to regulators, and shed light on best-practice security controls.
In this Article
- ¿Qué es una evaluación de riesgos de proveedores?
- Why Vendor Risk Assessments Matter
- What Are the Different Types of Vendor Risk?
- How Do You Score Vendor Risk?
- How to Conduct a Vendor Risk Assessment: Step-by-Step
- Cómo iniciar un programa de evaluación de riesgos de proveedores
- Próximos pasos
- Preguntas frecuentes
¿Qué es una evaluación de riesgos de proveedores?
A vendor risk assessment is a process companies use to evaluate potential risks when working with third parties such as vendors, suppliers, contractors, or other business partners. It involves assessing risks during different stages of the vendor lifecycle, from sourcing and selection to offboarding and termination.
Las evaluaciones suelen incluir la recopilación de información sobre la seguridad, los controles de privacidad, los datos financieros y operativos y las políticas del proveedor, a menudo mediante cuestionarios. A continuación, los riesgos identificados se clasifican en función de su gravedad, probabilidad y otros factores. Los resultados se suelen ajustar a los requisitos reglamentarios, las normas de cumplimiento y los marcos de seguridad, como ISO y NIST.
Las evaluaciones del riesgo de los proveedores tienen en cuenta una serie de factores durante las distintas etapas del ciclo de vida de la gestión de proveedores, entre ellos:
- During onboarding, as due diligence to gauge inherent risk before granting access to critical systems and data
- Periódicamente, para comprobar los acuerdos de nivel de servicio, evaluar el cumplimiento de los contratos o satisfacer los requisitos de auditoría.
- Durante la baja, asegúrese de que el acceso al sistema ha finalizado y de que los datos se han protegido o destruido de acuerdo con la normativa.
- Durante la respuesta a incidentes para determinar el alcance potencial y el impacto de las violaciones de seguridad
Why Vendor Risk Assessments Matter
Third-party incidents don’t stay third-party for long. Supply chain disruptions, ransomware attacks, and vendor failures have repeatedly translated into operational breakdowns, regulatory scrutiny, and financial losses for the organizations downstream. Organizations with mature third-party risk management programs are consistently better positioned to contain the damage, not because they prevent every incident, but because they’ve already mapped the exposure.
Implementing third-party risk assessment workflows that focus on operational risks, business continuity, and security risks enables your organization to streamline procurement processes, improve supply chain resilience, and satisfy compliance audits. What’s more, the cost to build and maintain a strategic third-party assessment practice is far less than the potential damage high-risk vendors can cause.
What Are the Different Types of Vendor Risk?
There are three primary types of risk when dealing with third parties: profiled risk, inherent risk, and residual risk. Here is a brief breakdown of the three:
- Profiled Risk relates directly to the vendor’s relationship with your organization. Certain vendors pose more risks. For example, a credit card processing company likely poses more risk to your organization than a digital advertising agency. Organizations with a higher level of profiled risk require extra scrutiny during vendor selection.
- Inherent Risks refer to risks that the vendor poses due to its own information security, operational, financial, and other business practices prior to implementing any controls required by your organization. Determining a potential vendor’s inherent risk score requires a combination of detailed vendor assessment questionnaires and external threat monitoring.
- Residual Risk is the level of leftover risk once the organization in question has implemented your organization’s mandatory controls. Residual risk can never be eliminated, but it can be brought to a level that the organization deems acceptable.
How Do You Score Vendor Risk?
The basic calculation for scoring vendor risk is Likelihood x Impact = Risk. For example, let’s say a hospital vendor is processing large amounts of protected health information (PHI) but does not comply with HIPAA. Under HIPAA, this vendor would be classified as a business associate and fall under the same regulatory scrutiny as the healthcare provider.
In this case, the impact is a large fine to both the healthcare provider and the business associate (major or severe), and the likelihood that regulators will discover the non-compliance is high, making this an unacceptable risk for any healthcare organization.
El ejemplo anterior pone de relieve la importancia de realizar evaluaciones exhaustivas de los riesgos de los proveedores. Esto es aún más importante para las organizaciones que manejan grandes cantidades de datos confidenciales, como los contratistas del gobierno y los proveedores de atención sanitaria. En muchos casos, normativas como la HIPAA responsabilizan a la organización principal del incumplimiento por parte del proveedor.
How to Conduct a Vendor Risk Assessment: Step-by-Step
-
Assemble Internal Stakeholders
The most successful vendor risk assessment programs are cross-functional. Stakeholders across the organization bring different priorities to the process, and all of them matter:
Papel Ejemplo de prioridades Gestión de riesgos Unificar las evaluaciones de proveedores con iniciativas más amplias de gestión de riesgos organizativos e integrar los datos de riesgos de terceros con plataformas GRC. Adquisiciones y contratación Buscar proveedores de bajo riesgo, realizar la diligencia debida previa al contrato, evaluar el rendimiento de los proveedores y garantizar el cumplimiento de las obligaciones contractuales. Seguridad e informática Identificar, analizar y remediar los riesgos de ciberseguridad relacionados con terceros. Auditoría y cumplimiento Comprender e informar sobre los riesgos de los proveedores en el contexto de las normativas gubernamentales y los marcos del sector. Protección de datos Identificación de los proveedores que manejan datos privados, realización de evaluaciones del impacto sobre la privacidad y elaboración de informes en función de los requisitos de cumplimiento de la privacidad. Assembling a cross-functional team to plan and guide your assessment program will help to ensure its organizational adoption and long-term success.
-
Defina su nivel aceptable de riesgo residual.
In a perfect world, risk could be eliminated entirely. Unfortunately, when working with any third party, there will always be some element of risk. Before assessing potential vendors for a project, you need to define what level of risk is acceptable. This can make vendor selection and the entire third-party risk management process faster, more efficient, and more uniform.
This enables you to easily identify vendors that clearly won’t meet your business objectives and risk tolerance. In addition, it can help clarify which controls you need to require of vendors before working with them.
-
Build Your Vendor Risk Assessment Process
Implantar un proceso con controles y requisitos estandarizados. Sin embargo, no existe un enfoque único para la evaluación del riesgo de los proveedores. Los distintos proveedores presentan diferentes niveles de riesgo para su organización, en función de factores como:
- Su importancia en la cadena de suministro, especialmente si se trata de un proveedor único.
- Su acceso a datos sensibles, como información personal identificable (PII), información sanitaria protegida (PHI) o información comercial sensible (CSI).
- Su vulnerabilidad a las perturbaciones, como catástrofes naturales o conflictos geopolíticos.
Begin with an internal profiling and tiering assessment to categorize your vendors and determine the type, scope, and frequency of assessment needed for each group. For instance, vendors critical to your business and with high-risk potential (e.g., accounting firms or sole-source suppliers) require more thorough due diligence than those with lower-risk profiles (e.g., advertising firms).
Contar con un proceso estructurado para cada categoría de proveedores hace que su programa de gestión de riesgos de terceros sea más eficaz y le ayuda a tomar mejores decisiones basadas en el riesgo sobre sus relaciones con los proveedores.
-
Send Vendor Risk Assessment Questionnaires
El siguiente paso consiste en seleccionar y enviar cuestionarios de evaluación de riesgos para cada proveedor o categoría de proveedores. Los cuestionarios proporcionan un enfoque basado en la confianza para recopilar información sobre los controles internos de cada proveedor. Pueden abarcar diversos temas, como las prácticas de seguridad de la información, los requisitos de cumplimiento, la estabilidad financiera y los datos de proveedores de cuarta y enésima parte.
Selecting a questionnaire: One of the biggest choices companies face when selecting questionnaires for their primary risk assessments is whether to use an industry-standard questionnaire, such as the Standard Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire, or a proprietary questionnaire.
In some cases, your third parties may already have an information security certification, such as CMMC or SOC 2. You may accept these certifications instead of requiring an assessment response or supplement them with proprietary and/or ad-hoc assessments to gather information about specific controls or potential risks outside of cybersecurity.
Choosing a framework: Many organizations choose to employ frameworks when designing their vendor assessment questionnaires, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO 27001, and NIST 800-30, to ensure that questionnaires are standard across the supply chain and reflect best practices.
If you require your suppliers to be compliant with specific regulations such as the GDPR or PCI DSS, it may be worth incorporating questions around those standards directly into your vendor risk management program.
-
Complement Assessments with Continuous Risk Monitoring
Cybersecurity vulnerabilities, supply chain challenges, and compliance requirements evolve continuously. Therefore, be sure to conduct continuous risk monitoring to catch any cyber, business, or reputational risks that arise between your periodic vendor assessments. You can also use risk data to verify that a third party’s assessment responses are consistent with their real-world business activities.
Vendor data breaches, exposed credentials, and other cyber risks: Third-party data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber incidents are constant and pervasive threats to organizations today. Therefore, conducting external monitoring of cybersecurity risks across your vendor ecosystem is critical.
Key risks to look out for include:
- exposiciones de credenciales
- violaciones de datos e incidentes confirmados
- errores de configuración y vulnerabilidades de las aplicaciones web
- typosquatting y otras amenazas para las marcas
Supplier finances, business practices and reputation: While third-party breaches and cybersecurity incidents tend to monopolize the headlines, a supplier’s financial failure, operational disruptions, or bad press can have serious implications for your business. These “non-IT” risks also extend to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges, like modern slavery, bribery/corruption, and consumer protection issues.
Busque noticias, información financiera y relaciones con terceros que puedan indicar problemas. Examine las prácticas empresariales de los proveedores, el abastecimiento de materias primas y otros procesos empresariales clave que puedan plantear problemas éticos o de reputación a su empresa. Además, pida referencias de clientes y socios que utilicen los productos y servicios del tercero. Hable con las referencias para obtener más información sobre la capacidad del tercero para cumplir los acuerdos de nivel de servicio y otras obligaciones contractuales.
Selecting a Monitoring Strategy: From open-source intelligence to public websites, there is no shortage of places to find intelligence on your third parties. However, building a comprehensive and efficient monitoring program from scratch can be difficult. Many companies leverage automated vendor threat monitoring software for risk identification and scoring.
-
Categorize and Remediate Risks
Los riesgos pueden clasificarse como aceptables o inaceptables. Los riesgos inaceptables deben remediarse antes de trabajar con el proveedor. La corrección de riesgos de terceros puede adoptar diversas formas. Una organización puede optar por pedir a un proveedor potencial que obtenga una certificación de seguridad como SOC 2, cesar las relaciones con proveedores de cuarta y enésima parte, o cambiar las prácticas empresariales que podrían causar interrupciones en la cadena de suministro u otras.
In addition, organizations should have a third-party incident response strategy in the event that a vendor suffers a data breach or other disruption. Having a defined strategy for dealing with risks that materialize can dramatically cut down on the time it takes to mount an effective response and reduce disruption to your organization.
Cómo iniciar un programa de evaluación de riesgos de proveedores
Un error que cometen muchas empresas al poner en marcha un programa de evaluación es confiar en el correo electrónico y las hojas de cálculo para realizar el trabajo. A menos que solo se trabaje con un puñado de proveedores, este enfoque manual de las evaluaciones puede ser una pesadilla para auditores y proveedores, además de aportar pocos datos útiles.
If you’re looking to launch an assessment program, a great place to start is by subscribing to a vendor intelligence network, which offers access to a library of vendor risk reports based on standardized assessment data. Then, for increased customization and control, consider an automated vendor risk assessment solution that enables you to conduct and manage your assessment initiatives. Or, if you prefer a more hands-off approach, a managed service provider can conduct assessments on your behalf.
Preguntas frecuentes
What is a vendor risk assessment?
A vendor risk assessment is the process of evaluating the risks a third-party vendor poses across cybersecurity, financial, operational, and compliance dimensions. It is conducted at multiple points in the vendor lifecycle, not just at onboarding.
What is the difference between a vendor risk assessment and vendor due diligence?
Vendor due diligence is a one-time pre-contract evaluation. A vendor risk assessment is an ongoing process conducted at multiple stages of the vendor lifecycle. Due diligence establishes a baseline; vendor risk assessment maintains it.
How often should vendor risk assessments be conducted?
Critical and high-risk vendors should be assessed annually or after significant incidents. Medium-risk vendors typically require reassessment every one to two years, and low-risk vendors every two to three years or at contract renewal. Continuous monitoring supplements all periodic assessments.
What is a vendor risk assessment template?
A vendor risk assessment template is a standardized document for evaluating third-party risks consistently across all vendors. It typically includes sections for vendor information, risk categories, scoring criteria, and remediation tracking. Download Mitratech’s vendor risk assessment template to get started.
Ready to scale your vendor risk assessment program?
Learn how Mitratech can help
Programe una demostraciónEditor’s Note: This post was originally published on Prevalent.net. In October 2024, Mitratech acquired the AI-enabled third-party risk management, Prevalent. The content has since been updated to include information aligned with our product offerings, regulatory changes, and compliance.
