How to Deal with Vendors Without Sacrificing Security

Third-party vendors are essential for today's businesses; they deliver mission-critical resources and tools to the organizations that utilize them, including raw materials, software, and other services. Alas, these vendors can also serve as direct lines into your business for a cyberattack to take advantage of for their own purposes.

Listed below: how you can still lean on your vendors without sacrificing your critically important security.

How to Ensure Your Vendors Aren’t Undercutting Your Business Security

First, You Need to Know Who You’re Working With 

Any vendor you work with is going to have access to your business to some degree. Thus, it is imperative to keep a running list of all merchants and providers you work with and exactly what each can access or has been provided.

As we said, any vendor will have some level of access, but you need to know that each of yours handles that access responsibly and securely. It also doesn’t hurt to check that you haven’t provided excessive permissions where they aren’t necessary.

Second, Evaluate Each Prospective Vendor to Check Their Diligence

Just like you would interview a job candidate to fill a position at your company, you need to consider which vendors are best—or, in this context, most secure—for your particular requirements. Create a checklist that can help you assess each of your potential vendors’ policies and practices. You must comprehend what each vendor actually does to protect their clients and their data, not just what they claim to do.

These assessments shouldn’t stop once you’ve signed with a vendor, either. You need to evaluate what data they need access to, how well they remain compliant with different compliance standards, and how transparent they are with the businesses they work with.

Third, Understand the Contracts Inside and Out

Let’s say you were to sign up to receive a service from a vendor, and whoops—your data was stolen from their servers in a significant cyberattack. Naturally, you’d expect them to make it right, somehow… but what if their contract with you contained a section that effectively shielded them from any responsibility? This may be an extreme example, but it goes to show how important it is that you have a complete understanding of the agreements you enter into so everyone can be held accountable if necessary.

Fourth, Keep Everything on a “Need to Know” Basis

Similar to how you should only give your employees access to the tools and resources they need to fulfill their roles and responsibilities, businesses in the Metro Washington, DC area and beyond need to provide vendors with the least possible access that still allows them to deliver their services effectively. Let’s look back at the hypothetical cyberattack we just established: giving your vendor more data than they need will only make it easier for this data to be exposed, as it expands the threat surface significantly.

Fifth, Communicate with Vendors to Plan Ahead

Security, as we’ve certainly touched on, is an incredibly critical facet of everything to do with your business… especially when vendors are part of the equation. Make sure you are actively working with your vendors to stay abreast of what they plan to do in case of emergency and what they are doing to increase their security.

Macro Systems Can Be There to Help You Handle Your Vendor Security Needs

Let’s face facts… this can be a lot to handle when trying to keep everything else in your business on track, too.

We can help! At Macro Systems, we can help vet and manage your vendor relationships on your behalf, ensuring the security of your data and that you get the best deals available. Your security is too important to assume that your business associates and vendors have it covered by default. If you’d like someone to take over this aspect on your behalf, call us today! Reach out at 703-359-9211 to learn more.