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MarshallToburen
Archer Employee
Archer Employee

What is Third Party Risk Management?

A third party is any entity with which your organization has an actual or implied contractual relationship for the receipt of goods and services.  Besides being called a third party, these relationships may also be known as vendors or suppliers.  An Engagement refers to the actual product or service being received by way of a contract with a third party. 

 

RSA Archer Third Party Risk Management provides organizations the capability to assess and manage the risks associated with their third party engagements.

 

Why is the proper management of Third Party Risk so important?

Organizations are increasingly using third parties to support their operations and deliver products and services to their clients. While it is possible to outsource many business activities to third parties, organizations retain the risks associated with their third party relationships. Many of these risks can be significant including regulatory compliance violations, customer and shareholder litigation, information security breaches, financial losses from errors, fraud and business interruption, reputation damage, and impediment to strategic objectives. Organizations need to understand the risks third party relationships pose to their organization and the adequacy of controls that their third party providers have in place to manage risk within acceptable boundaries.

 

RSA Archer Third Party Risk Management

RSA Archer Third Party Risk Management employs a series of risk assessment questionnaires to be completed by a third party to assess the third party’s internal control environment and collect relevant supporting documentation for further analysis. The results of these questionnaires are factored into a determination of the residual risk of each third party engagement across several risk categories (compliance/litigation, financial, information security, reputation, resiliency, strategic, sustainability, and fourth party risk).  Risk results are depicted for each engagement and are rolled up to the third party to depict their overall risk across all of the engagements they deliver to the organization. Risk assessment findings can be automatically captured and managed as exceptions and remediation plans can be established, assigned to accountable individuals, and monitored to resolution.

Key features include:

  • Consistent risk assessment and evaluation of third party controls
  • Capture and store supplemental documents such as SSAE-16s, financial statements, and PCI assessments, and monitor when refreshed documents are due
  • Capture declared critical fourth party relationships and understand the quality of governance your third party applies to their own third party relationships
  • Depiction of risk of overall third party relationship, across all engagements being delivered to your organization
  • Consolidated view into known issues
  • Organized, managed process to escalate issues
  • Visibility into known risks and efforts to close/address risks
  • Efficient program management and understanding of program status

 

RSA Archer Third Party Risk Management provides:

  • Methodical and standardized approach to risk assessment
  • Management and mitigation of identified issues and reduced time to resolution
  • Stronger, quicker response to emerging risks
  • Fewer third party related incidents and losses
  • Reduced program administration costs
  • Reduction of overall third party risk
  • Reduced repeat audit and regulatory findings
  • Better understanding of how third parties are used throughout the organization and the risks they pose

 

Today, organizations are faced with complex and fast moving challenges exacerbated by the very nature of rapidly expanding third party relationships.  RSA Archer Third Party Risk Management is one element of an effective Integrated Risk Management program.  Stressing the agility and flexibility needed by today’s modern organizations, integrated risk management brings together the various domains of risk across business activities (horizontally), connecting the activities to the strategies and objectives of the organization on an aggregated basis (vertically). This approach to risk management provides leadership with the most holistic understanding of risk facing the organization so they can make truly informed decisions about where to deploy limited capital and human resources to produce optimized returns for the organization.

 

As your company drives business growth through an extended business ecosystem strategy, your risk management program must evolve and manage risk more holistically, with more agility and integration than before. Managing third party risk and performance is one ingredient to showing real progress and improvement and decreasing business risk.  RSA Archer can help your organization better understand and manage its third party relationships on one configurable, integrated software platform. With RSA Archer solutions, organizations can efficiently implement risk management processes using industry standards and best practices and significantly improve their business risk management maturity.

 

For more information, visit RSA.com or read the Datasheet.