Most businesses nowadays including credit unions develop partnerships with third-party vendors, particularly technology vendors, in order to provide a better service to their customers. These relationships with third-party vendors can contribute to the improvement of the overall performance, reduce costs, and allow for greater convenience in the day-to-day operations. In fact, they can greatly help businesses to position themselves better in the marketplace and stay competitive.
Although beneficial, any external relationship introduces various cybersecurity threats to credit unions. That is if it is not properly checked and evaluated. For that reason, it’s of prime importance that all businesses get a third-party assessment before entering into a partnership with a third-party vendor which often means opening the door to malicious actors who could gain access to sensitive information.
What is a third-party assessment?
Simply put, a third-party assessment is a comprehensive examination of every vendor relationship that a certain business has established and it’s usually performed on an annual basis. It involves in-depth analysis and scan of all databases, networks, or applications. The purpose of this process, also known as third-party risk assessment, is to identify any possible security threats or vulnerabilities related to the vendor and ultimately find ways to reduce them. The third-party assessment can help you understand what could possibly happen if attackers could exploit the found weaknesses.
It goes without saying that a cyber attack can devastate any business, especially credit unions, regardless of its size. This can lead to great financial losses and even though it’s impossible to completely eliminate all risks and threats it’s worth investing in third-party assessment to at least mitigate them and protect the business.
5 Ways to Prepare your Credit Unions for an Effective Third-Party Assessment Program
Identify your credit union’s risk appetite
Any credit union, or an organization in general, is prepared to take or pursue a certain amount of risk. If you are able to identify it, it can help you understand how much risk you can endure from a third-party vendor. How to do this? – Conduct questionnaires and test your third-party assessment program internally.
Organize and classify your vendors
The entire process of third-party assessment can be much easier if you have your vendors classified based on their access to your networks, systems, or data. In this way, the possibility of missing an assessment of a certain vendor is eliminated. Especially if a particular vendor poses a greater risk to your credit union, with the proper classification every vendor will be assessed.
Review your vendor’s performance
Apart from assessing the possible risks that vendors are introducing by partnering with your credit union, it’s important to review their performance as well. In other words, you need to check whether your vendor performs all the tasks given to them. The best way to do this is to use service level agreements (SLAs) as part of your assessment process in order to provide feedback to the vendor and leverage it in the renewal of your contract. It can come in handy if you are thinking of switching providers.
Prioritize the assessment for certain vendors
Some vendors are more important than others depending on their access to your company’s data. Always make sure that those vendors who can easily gain access to sensitive information or your digital network are your top priority for third-party assessment. It would be a good idea to place them in categories based on the threat level.
Collect data through questionnaires
In order to collect important data from your vendors to better manage third-party risk, you should improve the quality of your questionnaires. It’s recommended that you use a widely accepted assessment (SIG – Standard Information Gathering) and customize it based on your specific needs.
As credit unions are becoming more digital these types of actions are necessary and many companies decide to invest their time and resources in cybersecurity. So get in touch with us sooner rather than later and learn more about the options for your credit union’s website security.
