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In a 2018 study by Onus & Ponemon on data risk in the third-party ecosystem, more than 75% of companies surveyed said they believe third-party cybersecurity incidents are increasing. Those companies were right to believe that.
As our world becomes more digitized, and thus more interconnected, it becomes increasingly more difficult to safeguard organizations from cybercrime. Tack on to that challenge a global pandemic that all but forced organizations to become “perimeter-less,” if they weren’t already, and the potential access points for bad actors through third-party access increases exponentially.
The problem is two-fold.
The landscape of third-party users is vast and continues to grow. From third-party non-employees like vendors, contractors and affiliates to non-human third parties like IoT devices, service accounts and bots, more organizations are engaging third parties to assist with their business operations and help them to innovate, grow faster, improve profitability, and ultimately create greater customer value – faster. On average, companies share confidential and sensitive information with more than 580 third parties and in many cases, an organization's third-party workers can actually outnumber their regular, full-time workforce.
Yet, despite the increased use of third-party workers in business, most organizations lack the proper third-party risk culture, processes, and technologies to protect themselves against the long list of third parties with access to their sensitive data and systems. Organizations have these systems in place to manage their full-time employees but lack the same level of rigor to manage these higher-risk third-parties. As a result, many third-party users are provided with more access than needed for their roles, and most disturbingly, that access is frequently not terminated when the third party no longer needs it.
Without the right third-party identity lifecycle management procedures in place, businesses unwittingly expand their attack surface, unnecessarily put sensitive information at risk, and create additional access points for hackers.
In a 2018 study by Onus & Ponemon on data risk in the third-party ecosystem, more than 75% of companies surveyed said they believe third-party cybersecurity incidents are increasing. Those companies were right to believe that.
As our world becomes more digitized, and thus more interconnected, it becomes increasingly more difficult to safeguard organizations from cybercrime. Tack on to that challenge a global pandemic that all but forced organizations to become “perimeter-less,” if they weren’t already, and the potential access points for bad actors through third-party access increases exponentially.
The problem is two-fold.
The landscape of third-party users is vast and continues to grow. From third-party non-employees like vendors, contractors and affiliates to non-human third parties like IoT devices, service accounts and bots, more organizations are engaging third parties to assist with their business operations and help them to innovate, grow faster, improve profitability, and ultimately create greater customer value – faster. On average, companies share confidential and sensitive information with more than 580 third parties and in many cases, an organization's third-party workers can actually outnumber their regular, full-time workforce.
Yet, despite the increased use of third-party workers in business, most organizations lack the proper third-party risk culture, processes, and technologies to protect themselves against the long list of third parties with access to their sensitive data and systems. Organizations have these systems in place to manage their full-time employees but lack the same level of rigor to manage these higher-risk third-parties. As a result, many third-party users are provided with more access than needed for their roles, and most disturbingly, that access is frequently not terminated when the third party no longer needs it.
Without the right third-party identity lifecycle management procedures in place, businesses unwittingly expand their attack surface, unnecessarily put sensitive information at risk, and create additional access points for hackers.
