Third-Party Risk Monitoring – Continuous Vendor Security Management
Secure Your Supply Chain, End-to-End.
Core to Cloud’s Third-Party Risk Monitoring service helps you manage and mitigate cybersecurity risks across your vendor network with confidence. We offer a flexible approach with two levels of support: a Fully Managed service where our team handles everything for your most critical suppliers, and a Technical Assist model where we empower your internal team with tools, guidance, and expert advice for broader supplier oversight. With continuous monitoring, automated assessments, and real-time alerts, we ensure no vendor is the weak link in your security.
Trusted by CISOs and IT teams at over 150 organisations
The Challenge of
Third-Party Risk
Modern organisations rely on dozens, even hundreds, of third-party vendors and partners – from cloud providers and software suppliers to contractors and data processors. Every one of these relationships can introduce potential security vulnerabilities. The challenge? Keeping track of all those external risks is complex and time-consuming:
- Manual assessments don’t scale: Traditional vendor risk assessments (spreadsheets and annual questionnaires) are slow, labour-intensive, and often outdated as soon as they’re completed. A partner might be secure in January, but by July, they could suffer a breach, and you wouldn’t know until damage is done.
- Limited visibility: You typically only see a vendor’s self-reported information or a snapshot from a point-in-time scan. This can miss deeper issues like how that vendor’s supply chain (fourth-party risk) could affect you, or new vulnerabilities that appear after the initial vetting.
- Growing compliance pressure: Regulations like GDPR, PCI-DSS, and ISO standards now explicitly require organisations to manage third-party risk. Failing to do so can lead to legal penalties, not to mention reputational harm if a vendor’s breach exposes your data.
- Exploited by attackers: Cybercriminals know that big companies often have smaller partners with weaker security. Increasingly, breaches originate through third parties – attackers infiltrate a less secure vendor to eventually access your network or data (e.g., a compromised IT support firm leading to a client data breach). Without constant oversight, these hidden dangers can go unnoticed until they cause major business disruption.
Core to Cloud’s Third-Party Risk Monitoring Solution
Our service is built to tackle these challenges head-on by providing ongoing, automated, and expert-driven oversight of your third-party ecosystem. We aim to make third-party security manageable and effective, reducing your workload while strengthening your overall security posture.
Two Tiers of Service – Tailored to Your Needs
Fully Managed Service
Ideal for your high-risk, critical suppliers. Core to Cloud takes full ownership of the third-party risk management process for these vendors from start to finish. We’ll onboard each supplier by gathering and verifying their security information, continuously monitor their external security posture, perform deep-dive risk analyses, and even engage with the supplier to remediate issues. Essentially, we become your third-party risk team, delivering end-to-end management with minimal effort required on your part. You receive regular reports and confirmations that your critical partners are being kept up to your security standards.
Technical Assist Service
Perfect for broader vendor coverage when you want to keep management in-house but need a helping hand. We provide our software platform and expertise to augment your internal team’s capabilities. Your team remains in control of executing assessments and follow-ups, but we supply structured processes, best-practice questionnaires, automated scanning tools, and expert consultation at every step. It’s a collaborative approach – you drive, and we navigate alongside you to ensure nothing is missed and you’re following industry best practices.
How It Works
Vendor Discovery & Onboarding
We start by identifying all the vendors in scope (often eye-opening to see the full list!). For each vendor, we establish a profile that includes their services, what data/access they have, and the inherent risk level. We then perform a baseline risk evaluation – this might involve the vendor completing a security questionnaire (aligned with standards like SIG or your custom criteria) and our team conducting an external security scan of the vendor’s internet-facing assets (checking for things like exposed ports, valid certificates, known vulnerabilities, leaked credentials, etc.). This onboarding sets the initial risk score for each supplier and highlights any immediate red flags.
Continuous Monitoring & Scanning
Once onboarded, each vendor is plugged into our continuous monitoring system. This means on an ongoing basis, we:
- Scan external attack surface: Regularly check the vendor’s web domains and IPs for new vulnerabilities, configuration issues, or changes in their security posture. If a previously secure site suddenly exposes a database, we’ll catch it.
- Monitor threat intelligence: We keep an eye on dark web chatter and breach data for signs that your vendors are in trouble. If we find one of your suppliers has had employee credentials leaked or was mentioned in a cyber incident, you’ll know promptly.
- Track compliance status: For vendors subject to certifications (like ISO 27001, SOC 2) or regulations, we track any news or updates that could indicate a lapse. We’ll also remind them (and you) of upcoming audit/report dates to ensure continued compliance.
Risk Analysis & Scoring
All the data from monitoring flows into a risk dashboard. We maintain an up-to-date risk score for each third party, considering their security controls (from questionnaires), technical findings (from scans), incident history, and inherent risk of the service they provide to you. This scorecard approach lets you quickly see which vendors are high, medium, or low risk at any given moment.
Alerts and Escalation
If our monitoring detects a significant issue with a vendor, say, a critical vulnerability on their server or news of a breach, we alert you immediately. For Fully Managed clients, we also reach out to the vendor directly to get more information or push for remediation on your behalf. High-risk findings trigger an escalation process where our team will work with you (and the vendor) to address the problem and ensure your business remains safe. This might include recommending you temporarily suspend data exchange with the vendor if the issue is severe, until it’s resolved.
Ongoing Vendor Engagement:
Managing third-party risk isn’t a one-off – it’s a relationship. We help facilitate regular communication with your suppliers about security. This includes sending out periodic compliance questionnaires or attestation requests (automatically through our platform) to ensure vendors continue to meet your standards. For instance, you might require critical vendors to confirm annually that they conduct penetration tests or staff security training – we handle that collection and verification for you. Our team is also available to join meetings with your vendors if a serious risk discussion is needed, lending our expertise to drive stronger security cooperation.
Review & Reporting
You’ll receive quarterly summary reports that provide a big-picture view of your third-party risk posture: how many vendors are at each risk level, key changes over the quarter, and progress of remediation efforts. Additionally, we can conduct an annual comprehensive review to reassess each vendor as needed, ensuring that long-term partnerships don’t develop unseen issues. These reports are great for presenting to senior management or auditors to demonstrate control over supply chain security.
What Sets Our Service Apart
- Holistic Risk Management: We don’t just do a technical scan or just send a questionnaire – we cover both technical and governance aspects of vendor risk. This end-to-end view means nothing slips through a vendor might pass a questionnaire but have a glaring security hole online, or vice versa. Core to Cloud catches it all.
- Real-Time Visibility: Our continuous approach means you’re not operating on last year’s info. At any moment, you can see the current risk statuses. This is critical for maintaining compliance, and real-world security threats to your suppliers are often threats to you, and you’ll know about them right away with our service.
- Reduction of Manual Effort: By automating scans and leveraging our team to handle outreach, we save your team countless hours. No more chasing vendors via email for updates or manually checking their certificates – the platform and our analysts streamline these tasks.
- Flexible Collaboration: Whether you want a hands-off experience (Fully Managed) or a hands-on approach (Technical Assist), we adapt. And you can mix models: let us fully manage the top 10 riskiest vendors, for example, while your team co-manages the rest with our support. This flexibility ensures cost-effectiveness and efficiency where you need it most.
- Improved Vendor Accountability: Having Core to Cloud involved often motivates vendors to address findings faster. They realise that a dedicated team (us) is scrutinising them, and that cybersecurity is a condition of your partnership. We help you set the tone that security is non-negotiable. Over time, your entire vendor network will strengthen, which means fewer incidents and disruptions impacting your business.
Business Benefits
Protect Your Reputation and Customers
By avoiding breaches via third parties, you protect the trust your customers place in you. No one wants to explain that a supplier’s negligence led to customer data being stolen. Our service helps ensure your partners don’t become your Achilles’ heel.
Regulatory Compliance Made Easier
Regulators expect due diligence on vendors. Through documentation and reports from our service, you’ll have evidence at your fingertips showing active vendor risk management. This can help satisfy GDPR requirements, industry-specific regulations, and internal or external audits with flying colours.
Prevent Supply Chain Disruption
A security incident at a critical supplier could halt your operations (for example, if your payment processor is hacked and goes offline). By monitoring and engaging with suppliers on security issues, you reduce the chance of a nasty surprise that knocks out part of your business. We help keep your supply chain resilient and secure.
Save Time, Reduce Costs
Automating third-party risk processes and leveraging our expertise means your team can manage more vendors in less time. It also reduces the likelihood of costly incidents. In financial terms, our Third-Party Risk Monitoring service is far cheaper than dealing with even a single major vendor-related breach or months of manual audit prep.
Focus on Strategic Partnerships
Instead of spending your time playing security police with every vendor, you can trust much of that work to us. This frees you to focus on deriving value from the partnerships – whether it’s negotiating better contracts, collaborating on new projects, or focusing on vendor-provided innovations – while we keep the risk in check in the background.
Limited-time offer: Claim your FREE Third-Party Risk Report for up to 5 suppliers
We’ll audit some of your third-parties
Simply provide us a list of up to 5 of your suppliers / vendors.
We’ll conduct a third-party risk assessment on them, and deliver you a report… all within 2 business days! This limited time offer is free of charge.
So go on, if you are a CISO or IT team wanting to stengthen your third-party risk management, what are you waiting for?