Third-party relationships are the backbone of modern business – and their potential vulnerability to bad actors is often what keeps CISOs awake at night.
Nobody expects a vendor breach until it happens, and when it does, the fallout is rarely contained to the vendor alone. If you want to stop vendor incidents turning into boardroom crises, treat third-party risk as a resilience problem, not a checkbox.
Below we offer three practical, high-impact ways to build resilience into your third-party program – and keep your business running when others panic.
Identify the processes that absolutely must keep running (payments, authenticated communications, trade confirmations, etc.) and map multiple ways to achieve the same outcome.
- Key question – if Vendor A is unavailable, how do we still authenticate a CEO voice call, confirm a transfer, or validate a sensitive email?
- Build redundancy via alternative tech stacks, backup providers, or manual fallback procedures.
- Test the handovers – run tabletop exercises that force people to use the backups under stress.
Takeaway: redundancy isn’t just about hardware, but instead the full set of tools and levers that allow your business to meet critical objectives if a supplier fails.
A ‘runbook’ is useful, but it is rarely enough. For critical vendors, agree a joint, detailed response plan that spells out roles, checklists, outage triggers and recovery SLAs.
- Example – a network provider playbook that pre-agrees traffic rerouting, escalation contacts, and a safe mode for critical apps.
- Make it contractual where appropriate – the faster the decisioning, the less business friction during an incident.
- Practice it. Regularly. Include vendor teams in your drills.
Takeaway: pre-agreed, vendor-owned plans cut response time and avoid the paralysis that can happen when accountability is put to the test by a live incident.
- Monitor indicators of compromise, credential leaks, patching cadence, and external chatter.
- Leverage AI tools to aggregate signals to produce a dynamic risk score that triggers escalation and remediation workflows
- Make decisions based on current risk velocity, not last year’s audit.
At the end of the day, resilience is not about eliminating all risk – it comes down to ensuring you can keep operating when risk does materialize. To find out more about how Capco can help strengthen your resilience to third-party risks, please contact our experts using the form below.