The products and services of third-party have become vital of day to day operations in the firms. The companies densely depend on the on optimizing their solutions by reducing costs. The third-party companies ensure timely delivery of services and help you to meet you in smooth functioning of the business. The causes for approaching the third party for your business operations include the following benefits:

• It provides tools and applications for internal as well as external resources.
• It provides services for the software of the devices.
• Another reason for choosing third-party is consulting expertise for other tools/services.
• Contributing professional services for customers
• Achieving compliance targets of the company and network security.

The exposure to threats and risks increase with the engagement of companies other than their own in business operations. The danger is emerging from the involvement of the third-party needs industries to adopt a risk management strategy for these assets. If it is no done,  the result of this matter may involve the following things.

• Damage to the reputation of your company.
• There can be a loss of confidential data.
• You may lose the trust the of your customers.
• You can encounter downtime in your company.
• There can be unauthorized access to system, application and tools.
• Public disclosure or loss of intellectual assets, trade secrets, copyrights, etc.

There are three approaches to the third mitigate third-party network security risks that are identification, assessment and mitigation.

Step 1: Identifying third-party security risks

• At a high level, companies should follow these best modes to identify the security risks from the engagements of the third party:
• Identify risks by carrying a threat model to examine critical assets in with which the third-party tool will interact.
• Examine entry as well as the exit points for all the tools and services of the third-party.
• Carry out a penetrating test, and source code analysis classify the risks for tools and applications of third-party.
• Review all on-site engagements and interactions with the third parties.
• Check the additional risks by doing a red teaming assessment for the services that are provided by third parties.
• Open vulnerabilities which are publicly disclosed against the tool or service in use from a third party.

Step 2: Assessing third-party security risks

You need to follow the below steps to assess the security risks of third-party:

• Prioritize the evaluation of tools and services of third-party to handle the additional assessment cost to the security program.
• Assess the overall inherent business impact of each significant third-party tool risk.
• With the help of a non-biased resource evaluate the tools or services third-party.
• Conduct periodic assessments regarding access to authorized and unauthorized resources for third-party tools and services.

Step 3: Mitigating third-party security risks

To mitigate the security risk of the third party, you need to follow the following points:

• In addition to the interactions with upstream and downstream assets of the third party, maintain an inventory of all third-party assets.
• Advocate asset control for service or tool in the inventory of each third-party
• Plan and systematically review service level agreements and non-disclosure agreements of the third-party
• Build an open way of communicating threats and risks to the third party.
• Create risk profiles for each third-party asset. It will provide an overall impact to the business (e.g., revenue, services, etc.) in case of security risks.
• Execute mitigating controls for defending all third-party entry and exit points.
• Review changes from a third party before its distribution to customers and employees.
• Take authority and ownership of key management, data stores, and other significant assets hosted by the third party.
• Check authorized and unauthorized access to systems from the third-party assets.
• Monitor the activities of onsite staff from a third party.

This was all about the mitigate third-party network security risk. If you still have any confusion or doubt regarding it, you can contact us to Tech Support Dubai Team.