The Prevalent Difference: Why Customers Select Prevalent for Third-Party Risk Management

This much is true: You rely on partners and suppliers to deliver products and services to your customers. This much is also true: Third parties are one of the most popular avenues for data breaches today. Given this, it's no surprise that more and more compliance and industry regulations are mandating third-party risk management (TPRM) practices.

If you need to manage third-party risk, then you deserve a partner who can deliver a comprehensive TPRM program; not a just one-off project. Only a comprehensive TPRM program can eliminate the inefficient, manual labor traditionally necessary to collect, maintain and analyze risk across vendor ecosystems.

Our customers agree that Prevalent is the partner of choice for third-party risk management.

Prevalent commissioned a study of our customers in Q4 2019 to validate how we're different from other third-party risk management solutions. We learned that there are three key differentiators that make Prevalent stand out. We call this The Prevalent Difference. I'll introduce you to each of main differentiators below.

Differentiator #1: Visibility into Vendor Risks to Help Make Better Decisions

The old maxim is true: You can’t manage what you can’t measure – and you can’t measure what you can’t see. So without visibility into the risks your third-party vendors and suppliers pose to your organization, you’re faced with:

• Insufficient or unclear reporting on compliance or standards, which can lead to compliance failures or missed risks
• Too much complexity involved in producing audit reports, which can cause a delay in remediating business-critical risks
• Unnecessary costs stemming from investigating and remediating compliance problems

In an October 2019 survey, customers indicated that Prevalent’s capabilities to identify and measure risk – for example through the consolidated risk register feature – were a competitive differentiator versus other options in the third-party risk management market.

This differentiator was important to a Global 500 Pharmaceuticals company based in the United States looking to:

• Gain greater reporting against specific regulatory or industry framework requirements
• Improve cybersecurity to ensure that third parties do not introduce cyber risks that could negatively impact the business
• Reduce the operational burden (the process of assessing and evaluating vendors took too much time and resources)
• Gain greater risk-based intelligence

To address these challenges, they turned to Prevalent. In the words of their IT Systems Analyst:

Business Outcome: Prevalent delivers a clear, inside-out and outside-in view of vendor risks with actionable insights for enhanced decision-making on prioritization, resources and compliance

Differentiator #2: Automation to Focus Teams on Risk Management, Not on Administrative Tasks

The old way of doing vendor risk assessments looked something like this:

Determine vendors to assess. Design questionnaire to assess vendor. Send questionnaire to vendor via email. Receive questionnaire back from vendor via email. Ask vendor for more information via email. And more information. Wait. Wait some more. Get answers back from vendor. Populate spreadsheet. Upload to SharePoint. Tell vendor where they’re short on controls and need remediations. Perform some validation. Report on said controls. Repeat for the next <insert number here> vendors. Then do it all again next year.

With Prevalent, customers have recovered significant amounts of time in their vendor risk management process due to the platform’s automation capabilities. Customers believe that in-solution communications, scheduling and automated chasing reminders, and an easy to use dashboard for users and vendors are competitive differentiators versus other options in the third-party risk management market.

How much time have Prevalent customers saved? Several days or more according to 65% of customers.

Automation was important to a Large Enterprise Pharmaceuticals company based in the United States that benefitted from Prevalent’s capabilities including:

• Assessment scheduling and automated chasing reminders
• Centralized document/evidence management
• In-solution communication with suppliers on remediating risks

In the words of their Security Manager:

Business Outcome: Prevalent delivers a faster, more accurate, less costly process for assessing the risks posed by third-party business relationships.

Differentiator #3: A Mature Process to Enable Scale

Gaining greater visibility into risks and automating the processes for managing those risks should result in a scalable third-party risk management program that is built from the ground up to adapt and change according to business needs.

In an October 2019 survey, customers indicated that Prevalent’s capabilities to bring a consistent process to their third-party risk management programs were a competitive differentiator vs. other alternatives in the third-party risk management market. In fact, Prevalent’s capabilities help automate their programs so much so that nearly all respondents indicate they can grow their assessments in the next year, helping them scale out their programs.

Automation was important to a Medium Enterprise Professional Services company based in the United States that was challenged by:

• A limited ability to continuously monitor vendors
• A lack of guidance in addressing industry standards or third-party regulatory compliance requirements for cyber risk, InfoSec, or data privacy
• Having no centralization of TPRM functions

In the words of the company: “With Prevalent, my organization has been able to redirect resources previously dedicated to collecting and analyzing vendor-submitted questionnaires and evidence to other activities."

Business Outcome: Prevalent delivers a scalable, more mature program.

Why Prevalent?

If gaining visibility into risks so you can take informed action on those risks is important to your organization, then Prevalent is the choice.

How much is an hour worth to your risk management team? If saving several days or more dedicated to assessing vendors is important for your organization, then Prevalent is the choice.

If enabling your risk management team to be agile by simply scaling out your program is important, then Prevalent is the choice.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Read what customers say by checking out our customer validation portal and contact us for a strategy discussion on how we can deliver the same benefits to your organization.