Third-party risk management (TPRM) has emerged as a crucial challenge for contemporary businesses. As companies increasingly depend on a wide array of vendors, SaaS tools, and technology partners, they encounter diminished visibility, heightened oversight demands, and mounting pressure to demonstrate effective management of third-party risks.
Each new vendor adds a potential failure point, with security teams dedicating countless hours to manual reviews, evidence collection, and questionnaires. Customers, executives, and regulators now require clearer assurances, yet traditional vendor assessments can impede teams without providing a continuous risk overview.
In Europe, regulations like NIS 2 and DORA intensify this pressure by elevating the standards for managing supply chain and supplier security. As supplier ecosystems expand and new technologies are embraced, both risks and the urgency to manage them escalate.
Risk Increases and Changes in Nature
According to the Vanta State of Trust Report, more than two-thirds of security leaders (72%) assert that overall risk is at an all-time high.
This shift is propelled by the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). Threats are becoming faster, more scalable, and increasingly elusive. Attacks can be executed within hours, while AI-generated phishing, malware, and fraud incidents rise in frequency and sophistication.
Simultaneously, organizations are navigating increasingly complex ecosystems, with 56% reporting a vendor-related breach in the past 6-12 months.
The Importance of Trust
Trust is paramount. Enhanced security and compliance directly influence customer trust, with 77% of organizations indicating that stakeholders now demand verified evidence.
However, a gap exists between confidence and reality. While 80% of organizations are confident their vendors would disclose a breach, they cannot assume vendors are secure; they require verifiable and ongoing assurance.
Across Europe, trust is intricately linked to privacy. Supplier due diligence thus focuses on how suppliers process, store, transfer, and use data, not merely on whether they have suffered a breach.
Privacy assumes even greater significance with AI’s involvement, which is increasingly integral to vendor products and workflows. Vendors are swiftly integrating AI into their offerings, often without clear governance models. AI adoption is outpacing understanding, with approximately 59% of organizations reporting that AI security threats exceed their team’s expertise.
To build trust, organizations must intensify efforts to demonstrate privacy, scrutinizing and reinforcing their data processing and privacy obligations.
Insurance Tax
Teams are exerting unprecedented effort, yet their endeavors are frequently misdirected. Security and compliance teams are entrenched in manual tasks, including evidence collection, questionnaire completion, and vendor reviews.
This growing “insurance tax”—time spent proving security rather than enhancing it—becomes a significant operational burden.
For businesses, the question is no longer whether suppliers have been evaluated once. The question is whether vendor risks can be continuously assessed, monitored, and exposed—without imposing additional manual work on already overburdened security teams.
Why Large Enterprises Choose Vanta as Their TPRM Solution
Security teams are transitioning from one-time reviews to continuous visibility and AI-driven workflows. Vanta’s third-party risk management solution integrates agentic AI, continuous monitoring, and comprehensive GRC integration into a unified platform, transforming supplier security from a static box-checking exercise into an intelligent, always-on process.
Vanta’s AI-powered TPRM solution automates the most time-consuming aspects of supplier risk management. Its AI agent collects vendor evidence, analyzes security documentation against questionnaires, flags risks, and generates prioritized summaries—cutting review cycles by up to 50% and evidence collection time by 62%. For suppliers, AI pre-populates most questionnaire responses using existing documentation, expediting turnaround times.
Beyond assessments, Vanta facilitates continuous risk monitoring by analyzing vendor assets and surfacing threats in real-time, replacing one-time assessments with ongoing visibility. It also aids in identifying unapproved tools through Shadow IT/AI Discovery and streamlines collaboration via Vanta Exchange.
Vanta integrates third-party risks into broader GRC programs, channeling supplier information into compliance and risk registers. This creates a single source of truth, simplifies audits, and ensures evidence remains current and aligned with frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, and NIS 2.
What Vanta Customers Say
Vanta customer Pigment successfully operationalized supplier risk at scale, embedding security into its growth without introducing unnecessary complexity. With Vanta’s Vendor Risk Management solution, Pigment’s team gains a continually updated overview of the security posture of all its suppliers, enabling prompt responses to security requests and accelerating the sales cycle.
As Quentin Berdugo, Pigment’s Chief Information Security Officer, explains: “Vanta has alleviated a lot of tedious work… allowing me to focus on building our security program and improving our posture.”
Similarly, Duolingo has streamlined its supplier evaluation process with Vanta’s Supplier Risk Management solution. Mandy Matthew, senior security risk program manager at Duolingo, adds: “It’s all in Vanta: automated testing, manual testing, policies, vendor security assessments, and more. It helps us articulate our position to external parties and communicate our agenda internally.”
A New Benchmark for TPRM
In a world where ecosystems are expanding, AI adoption is accelerating, and stakeholder expectations are escalating, organizations cannot rely on static approaches to supplier risk.
TPRM becomes an ongoing process that monitors, verifies, and enhances security across the provider’s network over time. By reducing friction during vendor reviews, improving vendor oversight, and helping teams continuously manage trust and privacy, TPRM offers organizations a more reliable way to scale their third-party ecosystems.
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