When asked to make a list of vendors, InfoSec and IT teams typically start with the big guns first—high-profile partners and organizations that make it possible to deliver solutions to clients. But what about all of the vendors that other parts of your business rely on? Nearly every part of a corporate organization relies on a cloud-based vendor for their daily business, from payroll systems to email service providers to a customer relationship management platform. These are all vendors, and each one is sharing or accessing data with your larger team.
The New Era of Cloud-Based Data Sharing
InfoSec teams are tasked with securing and protecting corporate (or financial, health, personal, etc.) data that is shared with customers, vendors, and partners alike. As the InfoSec landscape has shifted from on-prem data security to cloud-based access, the way teams share data with vendors has also changed. Now, a simple API or file load can instantly transfer vast swaths of data from vendor to vendor. While this cloud-based approach makes things incredibly efficient for InfoSec teams, it also presents new challenges. One of these concerns is that, because it’s so easy to share data, the number of known—and unknown—vendors that have access to your company’s data can rapidly grow.
Take a sales team, for example. While an InfoSec team may keep steady tabs on data sharing across different teams, a salesperson working through a CRM can instantly upload information to a buyer profile or demo account without working through InfoSec channels. This CRM platform now has access to some corporate data without the knowledge of a security team, making it hard for InfoSec to protect and maintain compliance over this data accurately.
Managing Multiple Vendors with Whistic
As we move further into the cloud-based era, sharing data across teams and vendors is the new standard. While InfoSec teams can’t be everywhere at once, there is a way to stay organized and compliant: the Whistic Security Profile. InfoSec teams can create robust, flexible Security Profiles that can be continuously updated to reflect new information or compliance data. When users on different teams need to share security information with a new vendor, they can instantly and securely share a profile without needing additional help or input from InfoSec.Making it easier for other teams to share vendor security information doesn’t mean that InfoSec loses sight of the number of vendors a company is working with. Whistic makes it easier for InfoSec professionals to track and manage all vendor accounts accessing a company’s private data. Security teams can use Whistic to keep tabs on which vendors are connected to a system, how a company’s data is used, and when compliance information needs to be updated or revisited.
If your InfoSec team is looking for ways to manage multiple vendors better or needs to see how many vendors are actually connected to your system, Whistic can help.
Speak with us to find out how you can take a proactive vendor security stance with Whistic.
