CISO-as-a-Service Strengthening Third-Party Risk Management

CISO-as-a-Service plays a key role in managing and improving an organisation’s third-party risk management efforts.
Modern businesses rely on third-party services since it’s not possible to have an in-house team for every process, whether it's project management or development. However, third parties are external and you don’t have clarity on how they manage your data and ensure security.

This is where it becomes risky for organisations to deal with third-party services. If an attacker targets your third-party service provider with access to your systems and data, your security is also at risk.

CISO-as-a-Service comes to the rescue by improving your third-party risk management efforts at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time CISO. Let’s understand what CISO-as-a-Service is and how effective it is for third-party risk management.

Third-party risks happen when a cyberattacker compromises the security infrastructure, data, or systems of a third-party organisation, such as vendors, contractors, suppliers, etc. They aim to access the sensitive data of the victim and its customers or business partners to cause harm to their business. Types of third-party risks include:

• Data breaches
• Operational disruptions
• Non-compliance with regulatory requirements like UK GDPR
• Reputational damage
  
  

According to a report, 61% of organisations reported third-party breaches in 2023, tripled since 2021. Consequently, they lose their sensitive data to the wrong hands and are kept in the dark about how their data is being shared. What’s worse? Organisations lose customer trust, partners, and millions of dollars, and face increased regulatory scrutiny.

But why are third-party data breaches becoming more prevalent these days?

Thanks to technology, businesses can easily connect, scale, and expand globally. This makes supply chains even more complex. Since larger organisations have adequate resources to invest in information security, it’s difficult for malicious actors to compromise them.

On the other hand, smaller third-party organisations, like software vendors, contractors, sub-contractors, etc. often lack robust security measures. Leveraging this, attackers find it much easier to target these organisations to access sensitive data and use it to compromise the larger organisations associated with the third party.

Example: Microsoft’s Midnight Blizzard attack of January 2024 compromised the tech giant’s mail systems and data, including around 60k emails from the US State Department, threatening national security. Similarly, in 2023, one of AT&T’s cloud vendors suffered a data breach that affected 8.9 million wireless customers. The FCC fined AT&T $13 million as a settlement.

This underscores the need for third-party risk management by implementing proactive security measures when dealing with third parties. But today’s hyper-connected business environment has brought a lot of complexities, such as:

• Lack of visibility in how data is being handled by third parties
• Inconsistent security controls and policies of third parties
• Vendors failing to comply with compliance regulations
  
  

This is why traditional security measures are becoming insufficient to deal with these challenges. This is where CISO-as-a-Service steps in. Let’s find out how it can help enhance your third-party risk management.

CISO-as-a-Service (CISOaaS) is a service model where a service provider offers a business with experienced and skilled cybersecurity leaders on demand. It’s also called virtual CISO (vCISO) that provides tailored services based on an organisation’s unique needs to enhance security posture. A vCISO guides its security team, manages data security risks, and ensures compliance.

CISOaaS is useful for businesses that don’t have an in-house CISO and related resources to manage their cybersecurity programs. It works like other anything-as-a-service (XaaS) models where you pay the service provider on a per-use basis or subscription for completely remote or hybrid services.

By outsourcing the responsibilities of a chief information security officer (CISO) to a reliable CISOaaS service provider, you don’t have to face challenges, such as finding and retaining skilled security leaders. You get to work with experts to secure your organisation from threats while investing a fraction of the money since you can get services when needed and scale them easily when your needs go up or down.

Responsibilities of a vCISO

The responsibilities of virtual CISOs and in-house CISOs are similar. Let’s discuss some of them:

• Developing effective cybersecurity strategies that align with the organisation’s security goals and industry requirements
• Conducting periodic security assessments, gap analysis, penetration testing, and real-time threat intelligence and modelling to find vulnerabilities, threats, and risks
• Managing risks; not just external, third-party risks and insider risks too
• Protecting systems, data, and networks from attacks
• Incident prevention and response planning to minimise the impact of attacks
• Creating secure practices for business and communications
• Monitoring systems, networks, and security operations
• Developing security-first operations
• Defining metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of security programs
• Taking periodic security reviews and collecting feedback from employees, customers, partners, and third parties
• Managing security services and tools in use
• Understanding and ensuring compliance requirements, such as UK GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, etc.
• Facilitating employee training and awareness initiatives
  
  

CISO vs vCISO

CISO-as-a-Service plays an important role in third-party risk management. Here’s how:

Third-Party Risk Assessments
Before onboarding any third party, vCISOs conduct comprehensive third-party cybersecurity risk assessments to help the organisation stay on the safe side. They use advanced tools and techniques to evaluate security measures, policies, data management norms, etc. to find out if a third party is safe to associate with. This helps you make informed investment decisions and reduces third-party risks.

Continuous Monitoring
Even after onboarding a vendor or contractor, vCISO monitors their security controls and practices continuously to ensure security is maintained. They use monitoring tools, such as security information and event management (SIEM) software to detect vulnerabilities and risks in the vendor’s network.
This early cyber threat detection enables you to inform them immediately so they can immediately mitigate those risks and secure their networks and systems.

Ensuring Compliance
Compliance requirements keep on changing, making it difficult for organisations to keep up with them. And if you don’t comply, it could lead to reputation damage and heavy penalties in hundreds and millions of dollars.
A vCISO carefully understands compliance requirements specific to vendors, tracks them regularly, and ensures they stay compliant. They also inspect data management policies to protect data and avoid it from getting into the wrong hands. This helps minimise compliance risks and chances of data breach.

Incident Response Planning
CISO-as-a-Service helps improve your incident response planning by creating effective security risk mitigation strategies against third-party risks to safeguard your business. They create detailed frameworks, policies, and best practices that everyone in the organisation must follow while dealing with third parties. From communications to operations, these policies cover everything to help an organisation be digitally safe.
So, if an incident arises, your security teams along with other departments know their roles and responsibilities clearly and face attacks confidently. This helps resolve the attack faster and reduce its impacts.

Here are some benefits of hiring CISOaaS for organisations:

Cost-Effective
Hiring a full-time CISO is expensive. With growing security concerns, CISOs are one of the highest-paid and wanted jobs. According to reports, the average salary of a chief information security officer (CISO) in the UK is £130,000 (~ $165,000) to £160,000 (~ $203,000) per annum.
While it may work for an enterprise, smaller organisations with limited resources find it hard to accommodate the expenses of a CISO. Since SMBs are targeted the most compared to larger businesses, there’s a need to strike the right balance between securing the business and managing the cost.

vCISO ticks all the boxes by offering a cost-effective alternative to a full-time CISO. You can get the service as and when required with a subscription or per-use payment basis, instead of paying a fixed monthly salary. This means you can save significantly on your cybersecurity budget.

Scalable
Modern businesses look for solutions that can scale with their growth. With CISOaaS, you can scale the services up or down based on your current needs. It provides you with the flexibility to change service providers, plans, range of services you need, etc. and pay accordingly.
Here, you’re not bound by any contract or agreement; you are charged per use or on a subscription basis for as long as you need the services.

Expertise
When you hire a permanent CISO in your organisation, you’re limited to the specific expertise, experience, skills, and certification that they have acquired. In their absence, your team may feel less encouraged, confident, or effective if a security incident occurs.
With CISOaaS, you get access to a team of vCISOs ready to tackle incidents anytime. They have varying skill sets, certifications, experiences, and expertise in a variety of cybersecurity domains and real-life incidents. Therefore, you’re covered should an incident occur.

Improved Vendor Risk Posture
vCISOs help strengthen the risk posture of an organisation’s vendors by assessing threats and advising on resolution. They also supervise compliance audits, monitoring, reporting, feedback collection, and more to ensure nothing falls through the cracks when it comes to securing your organisation.

In addition, they perform unbiased security analyses, make important business decisions related to security, formulate security policies and best practices based on current trends, and ensure organisation-wide implementation.

Here are the steps you can follow to implement CISOaaS in your organisation to manage third-party risks:

Assess Vendor Risk
Conduct a comprehensive IT security risk assessment of your vendor’s security systems, practices, and policies to detect potential vulnerabilities and threats. To get started, list all the third-party organisations or individuals you work with. Next, document all the assets each third party has access to and at what level. In addition, note their compliance status and the sensitivity of the data you have shared with them. It will help you determine vendors that pose a risk to your organisation and data.

Defining Risk Tolerance and Compliance
Each organisation has a certain level of risk tolerance beyond which it can suffer significant losses, financially, legally, and whatnot.
So, find out your organisation’s risk appetite based on your business size, industry, and compliance needs. It will help you prioritise your security efforts, starting from the topmost risks.

At this point, it’s also necessary to map out compliance and legal requirements specific to your industry and geographical location. For example, if you operate in the USA, ensure you meet UK GDPR. Similarly, if you operate in Saudi Arabia, compliance with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) is a must.

Create TPRM Strategy
Discuss your security challenges with a CISOaaS provider and create an effective third-party risk management (TPRM) strategy. Before that, evaluate the type of pricing tiers and services they offer and get a suitable plan from them.

Your TPRM strategy must include areas, such as incident detection and response, data encryption and management, notification procedure, compliance, employee training, and more. You can also discuss the type of tools and systems to use, such as SIEM, EDR, etc.
Implementation

Implement CISOaaS in your organisation to protect your organisation from third-party risks, such as data breaches, phishing attacks, and more. Let a vCISO detect vulnerabilities and risks in your third-party service providers and mitigate them faster.

Monitoring and Reviews
Monitor your vendor security and compliance risks periodically to stay safe. In addition, measure the effectiveness of CISOaaS through metrics and KPIs, such as time to detect (TTD), time to respond (TTR), resolution time, communication and coordination, and more. It will help you understand which areas to improve on and enhance your third-party risk management efforts. In addition, you can collect feedback from your employees on the CISOaaS to address highlighted concerns.

How Microminder’s CISO-as-a-Service Stands Out?

We understand the implications of third-party risks on your organisation, and hence, we’ve designed our CISOaaS to provide you with proactive cyber defence. We offer:

• CISO advisory services to craft a winning security strategy
• CISO governance to establish clear processes, roles, and responsibilities
• CISO compliance solutions to meet regulations and industry standards
• CISO digital transformation to guide on cloud security
• CISO expertise to get innovative solutions and guidance
• CISO risk assessment to identify risk and make informed decisions
  
  

Here’ show our CISOaaS stands out in the crowd:

Tailored solutions: We offer fully customised CISOaaS based on your organisation’s unique security threat landscape and business size and type. We also consider your geographical location to ensure you meet applicable legal and regulatory requirements.

Integration: Our CISO-as-a-Service integrates easily with your existing security infrastructure to make your TPRM process effortless.
Proven track record: We have been offering advanced security services and solutions to organisations across industries for the last four decades, protecting them from evolving threats, including third-party risks.

Talk to our experts today

Implementing CISO-as-a-Service in your organisation is a great way to manage third-party risks, such as data breaches, compliance risks, and other attacks.

Secure your organisation from third-party risks by utilising Microminder’s CISO-as-a-Service. Get a full range of customised and scalable CISO services and proven expertise at affordable pricing.
Schedule a call with our security experts!