Overseeing business relationships isn’t just about controlling risk — companies must understand how to manage third parties holistically
Jason Koestenblatt
Manager, Content Marketing
September 27, 2024
Third-party management (TPM) enhances visibility across a company’s relationships with external entities like suppliers, vendors, and service providers. This practice aims to optimize value and mitigate risks associated with third parties.
In order to understand what comprehensive third-party management looks like, it’s important to understand where it begins and how it encompasses your entire business.
All third parties have access to company systems and intellectual property, necessitating proactive risk management.
Learn more about the third-party management lifecycle with this downloadable ebook.
Evolution of third-party Risk Management:
Expanding from risk management to comprehensive management: Traditional third-party risk management (TPRM) focused primarily on security. The field now emphasizes privacy, ethics, and operational resilience, including emerging risks like AI. This shift towards broader third-party management (TPM) integrates multiple business functions to address operational risks comprehensively.
Like any other relationship, your company’s relationships with its third parties will go through distinct stages over time. It’s important to have a third-party management strategy that properly accounts for each of the stages, and a software solution to help execute that strategy. The stages of the third-party management lifecycle include:
The roles that different business units play within third-party management are primarily determined by which varieties of risk they’re most concerned with. In the case of the security team, for example, they’ll want to know if any third parties have ever fallen victim to a data breach, and if so, how they responded to that breach.
Each business unit is going to have their own needs for third parties, which means they’ll also need a defined role and responsibility system that secures their organization within the company.
Roles of Key Business Units:
Effective third-party management involves understanding and managing the lifecycle of relationships with external entities. It requires coordination across various business units to address risks related to security, privacy, ethics, and compliance. By systematically managing these relationships and integrating risk management processes, organizations can optimize value and safeguard against potential threats.
OneTrust Third-Party Management enables greater risk visibility when managing third parties across the enterprise. The solution provides access to an array of functionalities, each built with automation and time-savings in mind. The solution includes Third-Party Due Diligence for entity screening, Third-Party Risk Management for risk mitigation and lifecycle management. Additionally, the solution offers out-of-the-box risk data on thousands of third parties through the Third-Party Risk Exchange, which features information from SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, ISS Corporate Solutions (formerly FICO), and other sources.
Together, these capabilities make it easier to confidently work with third parties by reducing blind spots across risk domains, simplifying compliance, enabling greater time to value when onboarding and assessing third parties, and enhancing business resilience with ongoing monitoring, all while surfacing data for faster decision-making throughout the third-party lifecycle.
To learn more about how OneTrust Third-Party Management can help you understand and address risk across your business, request a one-on-one demo today.
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