Written by: Jeffrey Wheatman, Senior Vice President, Cyber Risk Strategist

In every part of the world, security teams are at war. And they’re on the losing side. Cyber attackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, working together to amplify their efforts. Adversaries are actively collaborating — sharing intelligence and tactics to optimize their attacks.

On the other side of the trenches — despite doing business with hundreds or even thousands of third parties — companies are fighting their security battles alone. Corporations tend to defend their assets like lone wolves, with security and threat intelligence siloed within each link of the supply chain. While some know how to shore up their defenses, others are left open to attack. This lack of unity often leads to infighting and companies clashing with their own third parties — all while attackers coordinate their attacks to exploit weaknesses.

We know ransomware groups and bad actors are working together because the data shows an increasing prevalence of repeat victims — often in rapid succession. According to the Black Kite State of Ransomware 2024 report, in 2023, 104 companies fell victim to two attacks by different ransomware groups, with a clear downward trend in the amount of time between each attack. This indicates that ransomware groups are communicating and strategizing together, monitoring other attacks so they can strike while a victim is still unprotected.

While attackers benefit from shared intelligence, organizations fail to collaborate on defense strategies, opening themselves — and their supply chains — to significant security risks. Going alone is a losing strategy.

This lack of coordination heightens exposures and the likelihood of successful attacks, as even the most robust cybersecurity defenses have their limits. After all, each company only has so many resources.

But there is a better way.

Strengthening Defenses With Collaborative Cyber Threat Intelligence

To paraphrase my industry colleague Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest, who was featured in an episode of our Risk & Reels podcast, companies are currently defending themselves as best they can. Those that know how to strengthen their defenses are faring better, while the rest are engaged in a losing battle. It’s time for us to be proactive, reach out, and work together. 

Consider the impact of just 10 companies pooling their resources and working together to combat cyber threats. This means companies can gain access to the kinds of best practices and tools that others are already using to successfully defend themselves against cyber attacks. Now imagine 100 or even 1,000 companies coming together to share tactics, best practices, and practical defense strategies.

While this may seem like an ambitious goal, intelligence-sharing entities like ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers) and the NSA Cybersecurity Collaboration Center

are already turning this vision into a reality — and proving the power of collective action.

A prime example is the Northeast Ohio CyberConsortium (NEOCC), established in 2018. This ISAC actively promotes collaborative cyber threat intelligence across the region through industry-led efforts and public-private partnerships. By fostering an environment of shared knowledge and practices, NEOCC members have built a culture of collaborative defense, achieving significant improvements in cybersecurity resilience and incident response.

If Collaboration Is So Great, Why Isn’t It Happening?

There’s a strong case for collaboration, but to get there, there are a few issues with the current approach to vendor risk assessment and remediation to resolve first: 

• Lack of clear ownership for risk assessment: When everyone thinks risk assessment is another team’s priority, nothing gets done. By making it clear who’s in charge, everyone knows which team is responsible for taking action. 
• Identifying issues is time-consuming: Following a high-profile incident, companies often struggle to pinpoint issues and respond effectively across their entire third-party ecosystem. Without visibility into vendors’ platforms, organizations often resort to sending shotgun blast emails, which isn’t effective or scalable. 

• Security is on the sidelines: Business goals and objectives often overshadow security requirements — until a breach occurs. Security is frequently sidelined compared to focusing on delivering products to market or meeting revenue targets, leaving critical risks unaddressed until it’s too late.
• Inadequate security-to-security communication: When security teams identify a vulnerability in a partner or vendor, they often face challenges in finding the right point of contact. Instead of directly interfacing with the vendor’s security team, they’re passed through account managers, customer success teams, and other intermediaries, resulting in a slow and inefficient game of telephone. Sometimes, the message never even reaches the security team, leading to no action being taken at all.
• Fear of reputational damage or repercussions: Many organizations hesitate to share information about vulnerabilities or security gaps due to concerns about how it may reflect on their capabilities. They may feel embarrassed, fear being perceived as less competent, or worry about potential consequences if the shared intelligence reveals a significant oversight or weakness. This apprehension often discourages open collaboration and creates an environment where security teams remain isolated instead of leveraging collective intelligence to address threats.

Overcoming these challenges and working toward collaborative cyber threat intelligence might seem like a pipe dream — but it’s certainly possible. After all, the cyber attackers have already worked out how it’s done.

Strategies To Improve Vendor Collaboration

Organizations can improve vendor collaboration and security across the entire supply chain by adopting real-time risk assessments, providing clear remediation guidance, and closing communication gaps. Here’s how:

1. Continuously monitor supply chain risk and security vulnerabilities

Risk assessment must evolve from being an infrequent periodic task to an ongoing process. Some companies only reassess their vendors every three years — and that’s nowhere near enough. Point-in-time evaluations serve a limited purpose but must be augmented with real-time data collection and continuous monitoring. This shift allows organizations to identify and mitigate risks before they become crises. 

This responsibility also needs to extend across the entire supply chain. Rather than considering security as the responsibility of the individual CISO at each company, it’s essential to work together to create a collaborative bubble of security that encompasses the entire ecosystem.

2. Provide vendors with accurate and trustworthy data — and specific, actionable remediation steps

When a vulnerability is identified, most companies still rely on outdated methods like manual surveys to gather information from vendors. But without knowing which company uses which software, you might need to ask hundreds or thousands of questions to uncover potential issues.

A better approach is to leverage real-time data-sharing platforms that allow vendors to receive actionable remediation steps based on actual risk exposure. Legacy tools often lack the necessary granularity, but newer solutions can fill this gap. 

For example, Black Kite’s FocusTags™ can be used to uncover issues, automatically flagging vendors when they’re exposed to a data breach or attack — sometimes before they even realize it. Black Kite Bridge™ then helps automate and streamline the process of getting the issue addressed and sharing any relevant information with identified vendors, enabling risk collaboration across the entire supply chain.

3. Close the security communication gap

Effective collaboration relies on a direct connection between security teams across organizations. Too often, multiple calls and emails between departments waste critical time when addressing issues. Establishing direct communication channels between security teams ensures that the right people, those closest to the problem, can respond immediately.

This approach also helps solve the issue of false positives. Sending vendors irrelevant risk information can lead to vendor fatigue, creating a “boy/girl who cried wolf” scenario and diluting their response to actual threats. Black Kite Bridge helps by filtering out unnecessary alerts, ensuring only affected vendors are contacted. Compliance scores, risk indicators, and FocusTags allow security teams to communicate precisely and efficiently, reducing delays in remediation.

By closing these communication gaps and providing actionable intelligence directly to those who need to know, Black Kite Bridge helps improve response rates — with early customers already seeing response rates as high as 90%.

Collaboration: The Key to Successful Cyber Defense

Looking towards a future filled with increasingly frequent and sophisticated cyber attacks might feel bleak. But there is a path forward — one that hinges on collaboration.

To win the cybersecurity war, organizations must move away from isolated defense efforts toward a unified approach that prioritizes collective intelligence and collaboration at all levels. This shift requires enhanced transparency, open communication, and shared accountability throughout the supply chain.

Achieving this collaboration necessitates the adoption of the right technologies and frameworks. Historically, many organizations have struggled to establish robust cybersecurity practices, often focusing on reactive measures rather than addressing foundational issues. This oversight has left them exposed to threats, frequently entangled in longstanding vulnerabilities that should have been resolved years ago.

Now, Black Kite has a solution designed to address those fundamental issues. Enabling real-time risk assessments, actionable remediation intelligence, and enhanced communication between vendors and security teams, Black Kite Bridge^TM gives organizations the tools they need to collaborate and effectively respond to threats.

For a deeper dive into how you can transform your third-party risk response and build a more collaborative, efficient approach to remediation, check out our eBook, Chaos to Collaboration: Transforming Third-Party Risk Response for Zero-Day Events. This guide takes you through a before-and-after journey of improving vendor collaboration, streamlining outreach, and ensuring risks are remediated faster and more effectively.

The post Collaboration to Win the War on Cyber Threats appeared first on Black Kite.

Written by: Jeffrey Wheatman, Senior Vice President, Cyber Risk Strategist at Black Kite

I recently started a conversation on LinkedIn with a simple challenge: 

Let’s play a game. Churchill famously said, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” How can we apply this to cybersecurity? Best answer wins a cool prize. – LinkedIn post November 5, 2024

The quote, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth” by Winston Churchill captures a critical truth for our field: Once a cyber threat is inside an organization, responding can be both difficult and costly. 

The tiger in this analogy isn’t just about external threats—it also represents internal complacency, outdated strategies, and assumptions that can weaken our defenses. So, in a cybersecurity context, the goal is to keep our heads out of the tiger’s mouth in the first place through proactive planning and smart strategy.

The comments came pouring in, each with a unique perspective on how Churchill’s words apply to cybersecurity. Here’s my take on the common threads.

Takeaways on Proactive Cybersecurity Measures

Digital Walls and Rocket Ships

Many folks pointed out that cybersecurity teams often fall into a reactive approach, focusing on building digital ‘walls’ rather than proactively identifying and mitigating risks. The consensus was that a more effective approach requires preparation: comprehensive training, detailed Incident Response (IR) plans, and adopting a Zero Trust model, which means verifying every user and device, inside or outside the network. This proactive mindset—almost like thinking with a predator’s mentality—helps teams anticipate and counteract threats before they strike. 

One commenter nailed it, saying that if we stick to outdated thinking, it’s like building walls while hackers are coming at us with ‘rocket ships.’ It’s a losing game.

Decision Hygiene

The need for “decision hygiene” is another prominent theme. Just like you wouldn’t want to find yourself reasoning with a tiger after it’s already clamped down, you don’t want to be making high-stakes cybersecurity decisions in the heat of a crisis. By practicing decision hygiene—maintaining clear, structured, and data-driven processes—we avoid scrambling in the moment and can address threats calmly, with a clear head. 

In other words, it’s about having those strong processes in place beforehand, so we’re not forced into reactive decision-making when a serious threat strikes. In essence, decision hygiene keeps our heads out of the tiger’s mouth by ensuring we’re prepared and focused on the right priorities from the start.

This way, we don’t end up over-committing resources to minor issues while leaving high-impact threats under-addressed. With good decision hygiene, organizations can stay focused on what actually matters, avoid knee-jerk responses, and act quickly and effectively when it counts.

Pop Culture Defenders

A few responses took a creative turn, comparing cybersecurity defenses to iconic pop culture characters and tools. For example, some likened proactive defenses to the constant force fields in Star Wars, always activated to fend off incoming threats. Another comparison was to Inspector Gadget’s arsenal—using least-privilege access and multi-factor authentication like versatile gadgets to contain breaches and stop threats from spreading.

These analogies reinforce the idea that, just like you wouldn’t wait until the tiger’s jaws are closing, effective cyber defenses are already in place, always at the ready, actively preventing unauthorized access. With these proactive measures, we don’t have to negotiate or respond reactively in the heat of a crisis; instead, we’ve fortified our defenses well in advance, keeping us a step ahead of potential threats.

People, Process, and Tools

Many contributors noted that a strong cybersecurity strategy isn’t just about having the right technology—it also relies heavily on people and processes. While technology is essential, the human element can make or break our defenses. To keep our heads out of the tiger’s mouth, we need ongoing training to build a ‘security-first’ mindset across the organization, combined with continuous improvement in our response strategies.

Some responses mentioned the importance of tabletop exercises and realistic simulations, which help teams rehearse for real-world threats so that response pathways are second nature. This preparation ensures that, if a crisis does strike, we’re not caught off guard and scrambling for a plan—we’re ready to act decisively and effectively. One contributor even suggested keeping ‘breath mints’ handy, a lighthearted reminder that sometimes quick thinking and creativity are key to defusing unexpected threats. 

In the end, it’s the blend of people, process, and tools that keeps us well-prepared, so we’re never forced into that vulnerable, “head-in-the-tiger’s-mouth” situation.

Zero Trust

A strong theme that emerged was the call for a Zero Trust approach, which many argue is essential in today’s digital landscape. Zero Trust operates on the principle that trust is a vulnerability that hackers are quick to exploit. Instead of assuming any user or device is safe, Zero Trust requires verification at every access point, minimizing the chances of a threat slipping through.

Zero Trust is about never letting our guard down, even for internal users, because each unchecked access point could be the one that opens us up to a threat (and gets us in the tiger’s mouth). Contributors also emphasized that, along with Zero Trust, practices like decision hygiene, unbiased judgment, and systematic evaluation help keep cybersecurity strategies robust and ready for anything, keeping the ‘tiger’ at bay through vigilance and careful control.

Resilience is Key

Resilience came up as a central theme, with many contributors stressing the importance of an Incident Response (IR) plan that goes beyond basic defenses. An effective IR plan isn’t just about defense—it’s about being ready to respond swiftly and limit damage if a breach occurs, preventing the tiger from “closing its mouth.” In other words, resilience means planning and preparation so thorough that, even if a threat gets through, we can regain control quickly.

This approach to resilience includes everything from off-site backups and disaster recovery plans to training teams on threat recognition and response. When IR plans are tested and team members know exactly what to do, they’re prepared to act effectively under pressure. With resilience as a core principle, we’re not just avoiding the tiger’s mouth—we’re positioning ourselves to bounce back stronger if a crisis does arise.

Maturity in Cybersecurity Practices

A recurring theme in the responses was the importance of leaders embracing maturity in cybersecurity strategies. True maturity means treating preparation as an ongoing cycle of improvement, because without preparation, leaders may find themselves negotiating with attackers or regulators from a position of weakness, limited by their lack of preparedness. One response highlights that maturity in cybersecurity leadership is about positioning an organization so it never has to negotiate from a vulnerable state.

Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance – Don’t Let the Tiger Catch You

If there’s one lesson to take away from the discussion, it’s the five P’s: 

• Prior 
• Preparation 
• Prevents 
• Poor
• Performance

In cybersecurity, proactive, preventive measures are worth far more than the costs of being caught off guard. The tiger metaphor drives this home: Once an attack is underway, there’s no time to negotiate or reason. Instead, preparation, constant vigilance, and real-time adaptability keep the tiger’s jaws from ever closing.

Ultimately, the conversation highlights the value of a proactive, vigilant mindset in cybersecurity. By focusing on decision hygiene, Zero Trust, and proactive planning, organizations can protect themselves from the sharp teeth of cyber threats before they ever get close. As Churchill’s analogy suggests, success in cybersecurity isn’t about reasoning with the threat—it’s about ensuring it never gets the chance to strike.

For those looking to dive deeper into shifting from reactive to proactive cyber risk management, check out our ebook, From Reactive to Proactive: Transforming Cyber Risk Management. It offers strategies and insights to help organizations strengthen their defenses and stay one step ahead of threats.

The post Keeping Your Head Out of the Tiger’s Mouth with Proactive Cybersecurity appeared first on Black Kite.

Written by: Jeffrey Wheatman

I recently had the opportunity to speak with a group of cybersecurity and risk leaders at an event where we discussed challenges around managing third-party cyber risk management (TPCRM).The big takeaway: when it comes to managing third-party cyber risk, cyber leaders are feeling spread thin. 

I empathize with the frustration. With the expansion in size and complexity of cyber ecosystems we’ve seen over the last decade, it’s really no surprise. After all, most enterprises must assess risk for anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000+ partners now, often in the same amount of time and without much more budget than they had when they were assessing under 100 vendors.

Top 3 Struggles with Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)

From my point of view, struggles with third-party risk management (TPRM) come down to these three major challenges:

• Resource strain
• Limited access to reliable data
• Lack of clarity about who owns what, both within the company (Who owns third-party risk management?)

3 Strategies TPRM Leaders Can Use to Alleviate These Challenges

1. Improve With Processes, Not People

Let’s be real. Throwing more people at TPRM problems doesn’t solve them. The key to tackling third-party risk is revising the processes organizations use to evaluate security postures — not just adding more humans to the mix. We covered this in a recent RiskBusters™ episode, where we tackled the myth that you need a larger team to effectively manage third-party risk. 

As organizations grow their cyber ecosystems, it’s become increasingly more difficult for them to effectively manage cyber risk exposure in their supply chains. It might seem intuitive to add more security people when you add more third parties, but here’s the main issue: If you don’t have the right processes in place, then any size team will get stuck spinning its wheels. 

I heard several security leaders mention that they keep adding people, training them, and processing ever more security questionnaires—without moving the needle on decreasing third-party risk. When it comes to TPCRM, more (people) is not always better. It’s about the quality of the TPCRM processes and protocols you follow. You need streamlined standard operating procedures (SOPs) backed by the right technology to reduce noise and ensure quality data hits your desks. 

Ultimately, all TPCRM processes should have one goal: Gaining reliable data to make better risk decisions.

2. Source Data You Can Trust

Decisions are only as good as the data used to make them. But here’s the issue: Security leaders still struggle to find threat and risk data they can trust — and that’s because there’s both too much data and not enough of the right data hitting their desks.

Vendor assessments are a major source of that rapid influx of unnecessary data. Those assessments — aka security questionnaires — can be as long as 500+ questions. However, more questions doesn’t equal less risk. 

Defaulting to asking every vendor hundreds of questions only increases the work your teams have to do to parse through potentially irrelevant, sometimes even inaccurate data. (And it annoys your vendors to no end.) There’s not much value to adding people to a team if they’re spending time doing tasks that don’t increase insight into real risks or decrease their potential impact on the organization.

Instead, organizations must identify what vendors are most critical to their business processes as well as which vulnerabilities could have the greatest potential impact to their business. This greatly narrows down what your team needs to focus on to only the vulnerabilities that are actual risks, and not the giant mountain of risks that probably exist in your cyber ecosystem.

To prioritize vulnerabilities based on their level of risk to the organization, security teams can ask the following questions:

• What’s our exposure if this vendor does experience a breach?
• Does this vendor have access to our sensitive and valuable data?
• How can we keep tabs on new vulnerabilities this vendor might be exposed to?
• What processes can I automate to save time and resources?

When organizations gain clarity on those critical questions, they can better manage third-party cyber risk by sending over specific, relevant questions instead of going total buckshot.

3. Make TPRM A Group Effort

Ownership is another common issue in the TPRM space. At one company, the CISO could own all of TPRM. At another, there could be a dedicated third-party risk person or team — or even a supply chain risk-focused group. There’s no standardized approach today for deciding who owns what tasks, processes, and decisions related to third-party risk.

It’s critical for organizations to identify what works best for them. However, TPRM should always be a group effort. Leadership across the organization should understand how third-party risk is managed and why it’s so important. 

Why? Cyber risks often have a cascading and outsized impact. For example, a hacked vulnerability in Kaseya’s VSA software led to a massive ransomware attack affecting up to 1,500 companies worldwide and disrupting operations for days. While CISOs and Chief Risk Officers have a responsibility to captain the ship when it comes to TPRM, it’s also critical that organizations start with a strong cultural foundation that emphasizes the importance of security.

Additionally, organizations need tools that enable clarity, communication, and collaboration. These tools should help:

• Prioritize vendors based on potential business impact and Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ)
• Collect and surface relevant data on attacks, threats, and vulnerabilities
• Use AI to parse important security documents and map data to appropriate compliance and security frameworks
• Connect to your vendors’ security teams to share risk intelligence and collaboratively remediate it

When TPRM teams have a platform to manage those critical tasks, they can work together to mitigate risk more effectively.

The Black Kite Difference

At Black Kite, we built our platform from the ground up to address these growing challenges in the TPRM space.

Automated Processes

We leverage automated parsing technology that can sift through extensive security resources (like questionnaires) and identify what’s important vs. what’s irrelevant. That way, your teams can get the data they need to identify risks with greater speed, efficiency, and accuracy.

We also created Black Kite Bridge™ to streamline vendor communications, making it easier for organizations and their third parties to connect, share information, and strategize together after a high-profile cyber event. Simply invite vendors to our portal, where you can direct their attention to your most pressing concerns, share actionable asset-level vulnerability intelligence, and provide real-time ratings updates to simplify vendor engagement.

You’ll maximize time and value without adding unnecessary overhead.

Trustworthy Data

We know trustworthy data starts with trustworthy sources. Our platform aggregates hundreds of data streams from open-source intelligence (OSINT) across the web, including hacker forums, social networks, and leaked database dumps.

By providing consistently trustworthy data, we give our clients the risk intelligence they need to make smart choices. That reduces false positives and bolsters third-party risk management. 

H3: Reliable Cyber Risk Quantification

Our data is always reliable — which means CISOs can trust that we have the viable cyber risk quantification (CRQ) they need to collaborate with business leaders on TPRM strategies and responses. 

We vet the data we collect against reputable standards, including:

• MITRE ATT&CK frameworks
• Open FAIR™
• MITRE CTSA

That’s how we map out CRQ. No magic tricks. No black boxes. Just facts. Industry analyst firm Forrester even highlighted our dedication to ratings integrity with the following assessment:

“[Black Kite is] the only vendor in this evaluation whose customers were unanimously satisfied with its rating accuracy.”
Plus, we distinctly map out cyber risk in financial terms. By putting an actual dollar value to risk, CISOs can better collaborate with business leaders and illustrate the practical impact of risk. That leads to better communication, better decisions, and better results.

It’s About Quality, Not Quantity

More isn’t always better. Quantity (i.e., adding more people or questionnaires) won’t make third-party cyber risk easier to handle. Quality processes, with purpose-built tools and accurate data, will.

We built Black Kite with exactly that purpose in mind. Our features help streamline processes with automation, deliver reliable data, and enable collaboration. Your teams will be empowered to make confident and informed risk decisions no matter the challenge—and finally feel like they’re doing TPCRM right.

Don’t just take my word for it. See Black Kite in action. Get a free cyber assessment. 

The post Why TPCRM Teams Feel Spread Thin and 3 Coverage Strategies appeared first on Black Kite.

Written by: Jeffrey Wheatman

When it comes to third-party risk management (TPRM), many organizations treat it as a purely technical issue, relying on cybersecurity teams to handle vendor vulnerabilities and security gaps. However, this mindset often overlooks a critical truth: TPRM is a business problem that requires strategic decisions based on business value, operational impact, and financial risk—not just technical fixes.

That means, you can’t just go throwing a bunch of technical requests over to your vendors’ technical teams. Yet that’s exactly what many TPRM teams do today. They end up sending the vendors a long list of concerns such as open vulnerabilities, missing patches, and other technology threats, believing that the best way forward is for the vendors’ technical teams to take action. How can your vendors possibly handle that workload from you, let alone all the other customers they serve? The truth is, they can’t.

As we reveal in our RiskBusters episode, there is a better way. While technical people play a crucial role in assessing security controls and identifying risks, these insights need to be contextualized within a broader business framework. It’s not just about patching vulnerabilities; it’s about determining which risks have the most significant impact on your business and working collaboratively with vendors to mitigate those risks. The solution? A balanced approach that aligns technical assessments with business priorities.

Let’s dig deeper into the facts. 

3 Facts About the Importance of TRPM for Businesses

Fact: Organizations are being targeted through their third-parties.

What You Should Know:

• Zero-day vulnerabilities allow mass exploitation.
• Third-party vendors are now prime targets for cybercriminals.
• An increased reliance on vendors increases risk exposure.
• A single vendor breach can impact many organizations.

With the impact of third-party breaches intensifying with each passing year, we see more and more cases in which vendor relationships become the “way in” for bad actors. The attackers themselves have realized how many of today’s businesses rely heavily on their third-party vendor relationships, and a single breach can cause significant cascading effects. Zero-day vulnerabilities, like the one found in MOVEit last year, make it especially easy for bad actors to exploit dozens of businesses using a single, vulnerable system.

Fact: Not every vulnerability is going to get fixed.

What You Should Know:

• Not every vulnerability poses a serious risk to your business.
• Assess financial and operational impacts first.
• Prioritize the vulnerabilities that matter most.
• Focus resources on high-impact issues.

When it comes to managing third-party risk, not every vulnerability is equal, and not every risk requires immediate action. The key to effective risk management is understanding the potential impact of vulnerabilities on your business. By using contextual intelligence, you can assess the financial, operational, and reputational costs of leaving certain risks unaddressed. This allows business stakeholders to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact, rather than overwhelming vendors with every issue.

With a clear understanding of which risks pose the greatest threat to your bottom line, your technical teams and vendors can focus their efforts on mitigating what matters most—ensuring that your resources are used efficiently and effectively.

Fact: It’s possible to overwhelm your vendors with requests.

What You Should Know: 

• Bombarding vendors with issues slows down remediation.
• Vendors may ignore unclear or excessive demands.
• Generic scores or long lists create frustration.
• Overwhelming vendors damages collaboration.

Prioritization is important because many businesses have tried to collaborate with their vendors and been met with silence or inaction. This is often because they go into conversations with existing or prospective vendors expecting them to fix an unfiltered list of security issues. Because after all, they believe that this is simply a technical problem and the vendor has the right technical people to do something about it! Because of this expectation, these businesses end up sending their vendors one of the following documents:

• A): a long list of security concerns (“Hey, we need you to fix these 783 vulnerabilities by next month.”)
• B): a vague SRS risk score (“You scored a D according to X firm. Fix that, or else!”)
• C): a lengthy questionnaire (“We want to make sure that you’re secure enough to meet our compliance requirements. Please take eight hours out of your day to fill in this detailed questionnaire.”)

But when they send this type of vague and/or overwhelming information without a clear idea as to which third-party risks are most pressing to fix, these companies end up sabotaging their relationships with vendors. The vendors either ignore the requests because they don’t know where to start, or the relationship becomes strained. Either way, it’s not the result you’re looking for: action taken to mitigate overall business risk.

Is a secure and collaborative vendor relationship just the stuff of myths and legends?

How can organizations shift away from overwhelming their vendors with technical requests and focus on what really matters—reducing business risk? Watch the video below to find out how aligning technical assessments with business priorities can lead to more effective, collaborative TPRM strategies.

Check Out Episode 4 Now!

Align Third-Party Risk Management with Business Priorities

Managing third-party risk doesn’t have to overwhelm your team—or your vendors. By focusing on business-critical risks and using tools like Black Kite’s Strategy Report, you can guide your vendors toward actionable, prioritized risk remediation steps. With clear communication and a well-defined strategy, you’ll not only protect your business but also foster stronger, more collaborative relationships with your vendors.

And with Black Kite Bridge™️, you can take what you’ve prioritized in the Strategy Report to your vendors with streamlined communication, allowing vendors to easily access your most pressing concerns and providing them with actionable intelligence. This collaborative approach ensures that risk management becomes a shared responsibility, not just a technical burden.

To learn more about turning TPRM into a business-driven process and debunking common myths, watch our latest RiskBusters episode above. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more myth-busting insights into third-party risk management!

To learn more about common TPRM assumptions and see if they’re fact or fiction, subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can catch all of our RiskBusters™️ episodes!

The post RiskBusters™ Reveal: TPRM Is More Than a Technical Problem, It’s a Business Imperative appeared first on Black Kite.