Proactively Identify and Mitigate Vendor Risk

IT priorities are focused on daily tasks, pushing risk management to secondary importance and diverging from a proactive environment.
IT leaders are relying on an increasing number of third-party technology vendors and outsourcing key functions to meet the rapid pace of change within IT.
Risk levels can fluctuate over the course of the partnership, requiring manual process checks and/or automated solutions.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Every IT vendor carries risks that have business implications. These legal, financial, security, and operational risks could inhibit business continuity and IT can’t wait until an issue arises to act.
Making intelligent decisions about risks without knowing what their financial impact will be is difficult. Risk impact must be quantified.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and what you don’t know, can hurt you. To find hidden risks, you must use a structured risk identification method.

Impact and Result

A thorough risk assessment in the selection phase is your first line of defense. If you follow the principles of vendor risk management, you can mitigate collateral losses following an adverse event.
Make a conscious decision whether to accept the risk based on time, priority, and impact. Spend the required time to correctly identify and enact defined vendor management processes that determine spend categories and appropriately evaluate potential and preferred suppliers. Ensure you accurately assess the partnership potential.
Take a proactive stance against IT threats and vulnerabilities by identifying and assessing IT’s most significant risks before they happen.

Proactively Identify and Mitigate Vendor Risk Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to create a vendor risk management program that minimizes your organization’s vulnerability and mitigates adverse scenarios.

Proactively Identify and Mitigate Vendor Risk – Executive Brief

1. Review vendor risk fundamentals and establish governance

Review IT vendor risk fundamentals and establish a risk governance framework.

2. Assess vendor risk and define your response strategy

Categorize, prioritize, and assess your vendor risks. Follow up with creating effective response strategies.

3. Monitor, communicate, and improve IT vendor risk process

Assign accountability and responsibilities to formalize ongoing risk monitoring. Communicate your findings to management and share the plan moving forward.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

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Guided Implementation 1: Review vendor risk fundamentals and establish governance

Call 1: Review vendor risk fundamentals
Call 2: Establish a risk governance framework

Guided Implementation 2: Assess vendor risk and define your response strategy

Call 1: Assess vendor risk and define your response strategy

Guided Implementation 3: Monitor, communicate, and improve vendor risk process

Call 1: Monitor, communicate, and improve vendor risk process

Authors

Scott Bickley

Melody Peng

Aadil Nanji

Contributors

Daniel J. Enneking, Founder, Strategic Procurement Partners
Donald H. Hopkins, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Wright State University in the College of Business
Deepak Bansal, Director Vendor Performance Relationship, Management, Willis Towers Watson
Steve Jeffery, First Vice President Strategic Sourcing, SunTrust