How to Improve Your TPRM with External Assistance and Validation

These days, it’s not enough to simply secure your organization—you’ve to ensure your vendors are secure as well. More and more, bad actors aren’t stopping at the first line of infiltration—they’re using the access obtained to penetrate through to affect their victim’s supply chain, making it incredibly important for organizations everywhere to maintain effective and comprehensive third-party risk management (TPRM), something that can be elevated by way of an external assessment. 

As cybersecurity experts, we’ve seen recent incidents in the news—just as you likely have—and the general numbers aren’t good either. To be more specific, according to a 2024 study performed by Prevalent, 61% of respondents reported suffering a security incident related to the usage of a third party in the last 12 months, which is a 49% increase compared to the 2023 results. So, to say it plainly, organizations must prioritize and solidify their TPRM programs in order to protect themselves, and to do so, the right solution may be to bring in yet another third party. 

In this article, we’ll detail how leveraging a third-party assessment or their staff can be advantageous to your TPRM, as well as the different options you have in this regard so that you understand all possible avenues to stronger TPRM and can choose the best one for your organization. 

The Benefits of Engaging External TPRM Assistance and Validation 

Before beginning work with a potential vendor, it’s important to identify: 

• What kind of risk do they pose to your organization;  

• What types of data will they have access to; and  

• How effective is their security posture?  

You can do this in a variety of ways—virtual and on-site interviews, site visits, and reviews of their compliance reports and security policies, and you should continue to perform these activities regularly to ensure your chosen vendors remain secure and within your acceptable risk profile. 

These are the basic elements of any TPRM program that every organization should maintain, but for some organizations, pooling the resources to do so can be tough. For some others, they’d just like validation that their efforts to manage their third-party risk will prove effective for them. 

And that’s where leveraging external TPRM experts can help—in fact, bringing them in can benefit your program in a variety of ways. Depending on how you use them, experts can help: 

• Provide Objective Benchmarking:
  In providing their expert, impartial evaluation, external assessors can stack your TPRM program against industry standards, including where you can improve as they can help identify gaps and weaknesses that internal teams might overlook. 

• Lend Expertise to Enhance Your Credibility:
  Being trained experts with comprehensive specialized knowledge, an external party can not only provide insights and recommendations based on their experience but having the input of such proficiency adds credibility to your TPRM program, since stakeholders will be further heartened by your robust commitment and proactivity regarding risk management. 

• Improve Your Risk Identification, Mitigation, and Vendor Relationships:
  Having experts on hand to supplement or assist your staff can also help provide insights regarding how to enhance collaboration and communication with your vendors, as well as the development of more comprehensive risk mitigation strategies and improving overall risk management. 

• Optimize Your Operational Efficiency and Strategic Alignment:
  Similarly, trained experts will be more readily able to identify inefficiencies in your TPRM processes and recommend improvements—which could lead to streamlined operations and reduced costs—while also ensuring that your TPRM efforts support your overall business strategy. 

• Establishing a Culture of Risk Awareness and Continuous Improvement:
  Bringing in external experts can provide the support you need to foster a proactive, risk-aware culture within your entire organization, as they can provide training sessions and help build out your internal capabilities so that your staff can eventually take the reins to maintain and enhance your TPRM over time so that your organization stays ahead of evolving risks.  

What are the Different TPRM Solutions and Maturity Assessments?

Establishing a TPRM program can be a daunting task—as such, the benefits of leveraging experts speak for themselves, and your options to do so extend beyond having an assessment performed.  

The offerings available to assist you in your TPRM endeavors can be divided into three main pillars:  

• Program maturity assessments;  

• TPRM assessment services; and  

• Staff augmentation. 

What are TPRM Program Maturity Assessments? 

Suitable for: Organizations of any industry at any stage in their TPRM program roadmap 

Should you engage an expert for a program maturity assessment, they would evaluate the overall maturity of your organization’s TPRM program against standards and best practices across a large number of industries.  

Program maturity assessments can help you better understand where you are in your TPRM maturity roadmap, where you should want to be, and how to get there. 

What are TPRM Assessment Services? 

Suitable for: Organizations struggling with limited resource availability regarding their TPRM program 

In our experience, one common obstacle to a successful TPRM program is staffing. With so many other critical business functions that require resources and talent, it can be difficult to attain the number of knowledgeable personnel needed to effectively run your program.   

Luckily, if you’re faced with this issue, you have the option to engage external TPRM assessment services, which typically involve hiring a third-party compliance team to perform virtual assessments of existing or new vendors on behalf of your organization.   

Such a move greatly reduces the burden on internal teams, allowing them to focus on the results and next steps instead of more menial tasks like chasing down responses and evidence.   

What is TPRM Staff Augmentation? 

Suitable for: Organizations struggling with limited resource availability regarding their TPRM program, particularly those who utilize third-party data centers or those in the manufacturing industry (where physical security is a must) 

Another solution to staff shortages and limited resource availability is staff augmentation. While very similar to the aforementioned TPRM assessment services in that a third-party compliance team performs the vendor assessments on your behalf, staff augmentation could also include on-site evaluations, depending on your organization’s needs and objectives. 

Also similar to TPRM assessment services, augmenting your staff with external experts allows your internal teams to focus on what matters most, and it also can reduce tensions between you and your vendors because—let’s be honest—most people don’t have a lot of passion for monitoring or assessing vendor operations closely. But by leveraging staff augmentation, you can put that onus on the external assessors, thereby reducing any friction in your third-party assessment processes and paving the way toward a more collaborative relationship with vendors. 

Moving Forward with Validated TPRM  

As technology and the threat landscape are ever-evolving, it’s as important as ever to confirm that we, as well as those we rely on and entrust with our data, remain vigilant and maintain effective security practices. Bringing in external experts offers several benefits that can enhance the effectiveness, robustness, and credibility of your third-party risk management practices.  

Plus, you have several options to choose from, whether you need to benchmark your established TPRM program or assistance with standing up or supporting your various internal functions, and Schellman offers all three prongs of TPRM support.  

To learn more about how our team and their valuable insights and recommendations can strengthen your TPRM, ensure compliance, and enhance the overall resilience and reliability of your organization’s operations, contact us today.