Gartner Critical Capabilities for IT Vendor Risk Management: How Important is a Complete Solution?

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Gartner released their Critical Capabilities for IT Vendor Risk Management report in November 2018, and among several key takeaways, a number of points stood out to me: 1) the market is in its early stages of maturity; and 2) the offerings are generally fragmented and unable to deliver a combination of complete visibility and automation required to lower risk and achieve compliance goals.

With an ever-increasing number of cyber-attacks originating from third parties, and growing data privacy concerns driving more regulatory activity, ensuring your suppliers manage information securely is a significant challenge. An effective program will survey each third party, determine their risk level, prioritize the highest-risk vendors, manage them to remediate risks, and provide audit reports for stakeholders. Done manually, this can be enormously time-consuming.

The critical question for you to answer, however, is: Can your organization afford the potential fines, fall-out from failed audits, implications of non-compliance, and potential loss of reputation and revenue, if you’re only seeing a partial view of your vendor risks?

That’s why here at Prevalant, we believe it’s extremely important to gain a complete 360-degree view of vendor risks – one that includes not only thorough periodic automated assessment data, but also continuous intelligence into the cyber and business risks of your critical vendors. Together, those two inputs yield significant business outcomes:

• Greater visibility: A combined inside-out and outside-in approach helps you make better risk-based decisions on compliance, to prioritize resources, and remediate risks. Included vendor threat and operational visibility reduces risk surfaces and eliminates gaps.
• Faster time to value: A complete view of vendor risks helps achieve the fastest path to compliance (i.e. makes the pain go away faster!). Combining periodic assessments with continuous intelligence yields clearer insights to better prioritize risks beyond just a number score. This approach also helps to accelerate vendor onboarding and re-certification and reduce an otherwise excruciatingly painful process.
• A scalable, more mature program: Automation, insights, and flexibility enable a more mature vendor risk management program that is adaptable to changing business and regulatory needs.

But I digress… back to the Gartner report

Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for IT Vendor Risk Management identifies use cases, evaluates capabilities, and delivers a thorough analysis and comparisons of 11 VRM providers. We believe that this research report validates Prevalent’s strengths in the VRM market—and we invite you to compare us against the rest of the pack. Prevalent delivers:

• A unique platform that addresses all use cases: Gartner recognizes that Prevalent’s comprehensive, integrated approach to IT vendor risk management delivered through a single platform addresses growing requirements for risk and compliance integration.
• Built-in integration for ongoing risk monitoring: Gartner recognizes that we go beyond data collection to help organizations drive vendor behavior. This is accomplished by not only the automation of assessments, but also fully integrated threat monitoring which informs overall risk posture.
• Specific industry expertise: As the de facto standard in the legal and healthcare industries, and with the authors and leaders in the shared assessments community a part of Prevalent, we have the experience and know-how to help organizations grow their maturity in third-party risk management.

For organizations that want a faster ROI and time-to-value that comes from leveraging broad and deep capabilities within an integrated platform, Prevalent is the number one choice! Try us, and we’ll prove it…

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