Enterprise Vendor Risk Management: Is Your Organization Proactive Or Reactive?

Organizations often fail to anticipate the risks associated with 3rd party vendors. The threats they have exposed their own data to, and possibly their customers’ data, are realized, on many occasions, only after the breach has happened and all they can do at that point is damage control.

Without a proactive approach to vendor risk management, your organization can open itself up to increased levels of risk that can have a negative impact on its financial standing, compliance posture, and overall ability to serve its customers. If you want to drive competitive advantage and sustain future growth, the focus must be on vendor risk management that is proactive, not merely reactive.

Proactive Vendor Risk Management

While anticipating and assessing all potential vendor risks may be tedious and even seem impossible, proactive vendor risk management is really a discipline that must be integrated into your organization’s overall risk management culture.

Traditional IT vendor management solutions take a reactive approach, using programs that assess, report, and mitigate risks after they happen. The emphasis is placed on reducing fallout and minimizing damage to the business. This focus on events that have occurred instead of leveraging predictive digital tools such as AI, data analytics, and process automation can be compared to the proverbial barn door that’s closed after the horse escapes.

For most businesses, 24/7 coverage of IT systems is not financially feasible. It is advisable to partner with a vendor risk management company that:

•    Provides end to end services including distribution, completion, and evaluation of assessments

•    Creates customized assessments based on the company’s exclusive vendor profiles

•    Immediately identifies potential issues before they turn into critical security breaches

Working with a managed service provider to move from reactive to proactive enterprise vendor risk management helps ensure that your vendors have the right controls in place to properly serve your organization. It also allows your business to improve compliance with regulatory demands, prepare for unexpected risk events, and maintain its reputation.

Putting Proactive Vendor Risk Management to Work

Adopting a vendor risk management strategy that uses the right tools to evaluate vendors and their processes improves your company’s ability to manage and/or avoid existing and emerging risks. Internal IT staff can also adapt more quickly to unwanted events or crises while building an understanding of how to assess and mitigate risks. Your organization then has a better view of potential future risks, how they might impact your business, and how to keep those risks at bay.

ComplyScore’s managed third party vendor risk assessment solutions help your organization approach risk management and vendor governance proactively and effectively at the enterprise level. By using a more forward-looking approach to vendor risk management, your business avoids unexpected events and expenses. That, in turn, results in improved compliance, a greater business value, and ensured sustainability. The bottom line? When choosing an MSP for your organization’s unique vendor risk management needs, look for one that can maintain a proactive approach that evolves as your organization’s vendor landscape unfolds and grows.

This blog was originally posted on https://complyscore.com/blog/enterprise-vendor-risk-management-is-your-organization-proactive-or-reactive/

AWS Security: Best Practices for Third Party (3P) InfoSec Risk Assessments

An effective vendor risk assessment is the cornerstone of every successful third-party risk management program. While the essential elements of an assessment should, in theory, be easily determined, the ever-evolving IT security landscape and threats is making the process more complex.

Addressing Platform-Specific Risks

Some recent incidents have shown that even respected security solution providers are not immune to breaches in information security. One such recent misstep by a well-known cybersecurity leader resulted in exposed Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials. This allowed hackers to steal information on customers who used its Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) product. This incident underlined the importance of drilling down on the specifics of the platforms used by the 3rd party vendors during the security evaluation.

Organizations focused on good vendor governance need a thorough understanding of each vendor’s security posture to mitigate and manage risks from exposure. Most 3rd party providers host and maintain core tech infrastructure in the cloud. While existing third party assessments all focus on governance, processes, and security controls, the questionnaires employed do not adequately address platform-specific risks. Since the majority of 3rd party providers build on AWS and/or Azure, we believe it's in our clients' best interests to be able to drill down and address controls that are unique to the platform used.

Best Practices for AWS Security

AWS offers multiple tools that allow organizations to effectively manage security. Identifying the tools a third-party vendor uses gives a good indication of that vendor’s security posture. For example, does the vendor create VPC flow logs to capture IP traffic information? Is Trusted Advisor used to optimize the AWS environment for performance, cost, and fault tolerance? Are malicious and/or unauthorized activities continually monitored with AWS GuardDuty?

For successful vendor risk management for our clients, we’ve developed a list of best practices for vendors who host on AWS.

Five risk mitigation best practices for vendors who host on AWS include:

1.    Security of the root account including disabling API access, alert set-up for root access use, and activating MFA (multi-factor authentication). 

2.    Access management techniques that include using groups to assign permissions, quarterly rotation of access keys, enabling MFA for accounts that have console access, and assigning unique IAM (identity and access management) usernames for each user. 

3.    Network restrictions that include using security groups to control inbound and outbound traffic.

4.    Monitoring, encryption, and other controls that help build resilient IT architecture. This includes 24/7 monitoring of AWS account activity, conducting risk assessments of the AWS environment, and enabling server-side encryption (SSE), VPC flow logging, S3 Bucket access logging, AWS configuration in all regions, and logging for all resources.

5.    Metric and composite alarms for events such as configuration changes, unauthorized API calls, non-MFA management console sign-in, storage policy changes, and changes to Network Access Controls Lists and network gateways.

Information gleaned on whether third-party vendors implement these best practices helps identify and measure 3rd party risks while delivering highly accurate risk intelligence that enables an organization to make more informed IT vendor management decisions.

Based on the above best practices, our vendor risk assessment questionnaires assess the 3rd party vendors utilizing AWS solutions, against a checklist of controls. This checklist is designed to make the process of assessing the security posture of these vendors simpler and more agile, and in the interest of minimizing breaches, we are making this list publicly available.

Check out the list here, and do not forget to contact us for any clarification!

Stay tuned for the best practices based checklist for Azure coming soon.

This blog was originally posted on https://complyscore.com/blog/aws-security-best-practices-for-third-party-3p-infosec-risk-assessments/