You can and must excel at your security assessments without EXCEL spreadsheets

In this age of supply chain interconnectedness, a large organization may have hundreds of third parties with access to its physical premises, IT networks and data. Your organization may have a secure IT infrastructure, but third parties can make it vulnerable to breaches, which often result in corporate data theft, brand damage and hefty government fines. Consequently, you must conduct risk assessment audits of these suppliers, consultants, contractors, service providers and partners. You must also run similar surveys in-house to ensure your employees and departments are complying with your company’s policies and procedures, and with external rules and regulations. These business process...
In this age of supply chain interconnectedness, a large organization may have hundreds of third parties with access to its physical premises, IT networks and data. Your organization may have a secure IT infrastructure, but third parties can make it vulnerable to breaches, which often result in corporate data theft, brand damage and hefty government fines. Consequently, you must conduct risk assessment audits of these suppliers, consultants, contractors, service providers and partners. You must also run similar surveys in-house to ensure your employees and departments are complying with your company’s policies and procedures, and with external rules and regulations. These business process control assessments are conducted via surveys and they evaluate areas of an organization such as its business continuity plans, physical and environmental security tools and practices, operational risk safeguards and human resources procedures. However, the traditional way of conducting these risk assessment surveys -- emailing questionnaires and tracking responses on a spreadsheet -- no longer cuts it. You must automate these polls to ensure the process is agile, accurate, comprehensive, centralized, scalable and uniform across your organization. SAQ Use Cases Here are six scenarios where you need cloud-based, automated risk assessments of third parties and internal staff: 1. Siloed, fragmented process 2. Inefficient manual approach 3. Daunting internal assessments 4. Overwhelming employee training requirements 5. Mounting regulatory burden 6. Fast-changing vendor landscape 3 Scenario #1 LACK OF A STANDARD THIRD-PARTY ASSESSMENT PROCESS SAQ Use Cases 4
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