Vendor Risk Management Best Practices

Your security is only as strong as the weakest vendor with access to your data or network. Supply-chain compromise is now one of the most damaging attack patterns — the INCD has specifically warned of waves targeting Israeli IT service providers, knowing one breach can cascade to all their clients. Vendor Risk Management (VRM) is the discipline of identifying, assessing, and controlling that third-party risk before it becomes your incident.

Why third-party risk is now front and center

Modern organizations run on dozens or hundreds of vendors — cloud platforms, SaaS tools, managed providers, contractors. Each connection is a potential path in. Regulations reflect this reality: both NIS2 and Israel’s Amendment 13 explicitly require organizations to manage the security of their suppliers, not just their own systems.

Best practices for managing vendor risk

• Maintain a complete inventory of vendors and exactly what data or access each one has.
• Tier vendors by criticality and data sensitivity so effort focuses on the highest-risk relationships.
• Conduct due diligence proportionate to tier: security questionnaires, certifications such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2, and evidence of controls.
• Embed security obligations and breach-notification timelines in contracts, not just in good intentions.
• Monitor continuously rather than once at onboarding, including watching for vendor breaches and exposed credentials.
• Manage offboarding deliberately, revoking access and confirming data return or destruction.

Do not forget fourth-party risk

Your vendors have vendors. The most mature programs ask key suppliers how they manage their own supply chain, because an attacker will happily reach you through two hops instead of one.

Persist Security builds and runs vendor-risk programs as part of our GRC and compliance service and vCISO offering, and can validate critical vendors with security assessments and monitor for their exposure through threat intelligence. Contact us to bring your third-party risk under control.

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