Third-Party Cyber Risk: The One Security Problem That’s Not Abating

The World Economic Forum 's Global Cybersecurity Outlook was released last month and once again highlighted just how concerning cyber risks are for the global marketplace.

It should come as no surprise that, with each passing year, the cyber risk landscape is growing more complex, making it commensurably harder for organizations to effectively safeguard their digital assets.

To be fair, larger corporations report having more confidence this year in their organization's resilience, meaning they are (at least perceiving themselves to be) actively working to remediate and mitigate what they can.

One area, however, that's an ongoing, prevalent, and painful thorn in the sides of many of these businesses is third-party service provider cyber risk. 54% of large organizations, to be exact, cite this as a major challenge to their resiliency efforts.

Third-party cyber risk, as practitioners are well aware of, can be difficult to assess at times, especially given the ways in which many vendors measure it.

Instead of modeling how a third-party service will specifically affect an organization's cyber risk exposure, they offer subjective information, such as scores, that do not account for how the service is actually being used.?

Cybersecurity leaders are then left to determine for themselves how this risk score applies to their specific business environment, an ambiguity that leaves them vulnerable.?

To more strategically combat third-party cyber risk, security and risk managers need something more concrete, something customized that can help them develop robust cybersecurity programs that balance productivity and innovation with digital safety.

On-demand CRQ models, for example, offer the financial and operational implications that an organization may face when adopting a certain third-party service, along with targeted mitigation recommendations that will reduce this exposure.?

The tangible, transparent information equips CISOs - and senior stakeholders, for that matter - with enough knowledge to make strategic decisions regarding third-party risk management.?

For instance, if, with CRQ, a CISO sees that incorporating a new cloud-based solution exposes their crown jewels to an additional $1 million worth of risk despite the other benefits it brings (i.e., increased productivity), they can then justify their decision not to adopt that specific tool.?

However, with these quantified targetted insights, they can also determine the ways in which to restructure data-sharing within their network and across various business units to ensure that the value of the new tool can still be realized while minimizing the additional third-party cyber risk.

You can't do any of that with a subjective score.

Third-party cyber risk is plainly becoming one of the most ominous threats to the economy, as business leaders feel they do not have the information necessary to achieve resilience in the wake of an attack.?

Especially considering these concerns, it's never been more important for enterprise-level security and risk managers to start adopting these CRQ tools.

Only then will they gain the granular visibility needed to build cybersecurity programs in which they're confident.

At the rate things are going, WEF will likely tell us next year that, once again, the cyber risk landscape has reached an unprecedented level of complexity and danger.

But hopefully, by then, such on-demand financial CRQ solutions will have been adopted at scale, and large organizations will be all the more satisfied with their ability to effectively mitigate third-party risk to an acceptable level.

If you're interested in learning more about CRQ and how its relative insights can help form third-party risk mitigation strategies, I'd be happy to chat more.

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Read the full Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report.