Organizations across nearly every industry have become reliant on third-party relationships to accomplish their business operations. You’d be hard-pressed to find an organization that doesn’t partner with at least one third-party vendor. However, this growing reliance on vendors has also created an evolving threat landscape—vendors are now prime targets for cyberattacks.
Third-party risk management (TPRM) is essential for any organization that uses third-party vendors. One key strategy in this management process is conducting security assessments to evaluate the security posture of these vendors. However, a one-time security assessment is insufficient to ensure robust security throughout your vendor landscape. Continuous vendor monitoring is essential to maintain a strong security posture and defend against third-party cyber risks like supply chain attacks.
Is your organization adequately monitoring third-party vendors? Read on to learn about continuous vendor security monitoring, how it works, and why vendor risk management experts prefer it over standard one-time assessments.
What is continuous vendor security monitoring?
Continuous vendor security monitoring is the ongoing, real-time assessment of vendor security postures to detect and mitigate emerging risks. Unlike one-time or periodic vendor risk assessments, continuous risk monitoring provides dynamic insights into a vendor’s cybersecurity performance, keeping you up-to-date on any new potential risks.
Benefits of continuous vendor security monitoring
Continuous vendor security monitoring includes the same benefits as one-time security assessments. Still, ongoing monitoring allows organizations to track a vendor’s security posture over time—identifying problem areas as they appear.
Benefits of continuous security monitoring include:
- Reducing the risk of third-party breaches: Identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before they become breaches
- Minimizing regulatory non-compliance fines: Ensures organizations remain compliant with evolving cybersecurity laws
- Strengthening incident response: Streamlines detection, which leads to quicker addressing of third-party threats and prevents disruptions
- Building vendor accountability: Encourages vendors to maintain stronger security postures and vendor performance over time
How does continuous security monitoring work?
Continuous vendor security monitoring relies on various automated risk management strategies and workflows to provide dynamic insights into vendor security postures. These strategies work alongside other procurement and due diligence efforts to create a strong third-party risk management program. Below are a few examples of the most common continuous security monitoring strategies.
Automated risk scanning
Automated risk scanning continuously evaluates a vendor’s external security posture by detecting vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposed assets, and compliance issues. This type of risk scanning automation operates similarly to attack surface management tools, scanning for cybersecurity risks like security gaps that attacks might exploit.
Automated risk scanning includes:
- Identifying vulnerabilities such as open ports, weak encryption, and expired SSL certificates
- Monitoring changes in vendor environments that could introduce security risks
- Ensuring vendors follow best practices by assessing their security hygiene over time
Live intelligence feeds
Live intelligence feeds collect dynamic cybersecurity threat data from various sources, including government agencies, cybersecurity firms, and global information security networks. These feeds provide up-to-date information on new vulnerabilities, active exploits, and evolving threats. Organizations can then use this information to cross-check their vendor ecosystem for new vulnerabilities or exploits.
Live intelligence feeds include:
- Informing security teams of new attack techniques targeting third-party service providers
- Providing early notifications about vendor-related threats before they escalate into data breaches
- Allowing companies to adjust security controls based on real-world threats—enabling a proactive approach to risk mitigation
Breach detection and dark web monitoring
Breach detection and dark web monitoring identify compromised vendor data, leaked credentials, or exposed sensitive data on illicit online marketplaces, hacker forums, and underground data exchanges. Often, this functionality picks up leaked data and new breaches before companies publicly disclose them—allowing your organization to begin remediation efforts early.
Breach detection and dark web monitoring include:
- Detecting if a vendor has been breached before they publicly disclose it
- Identifying stolen credentials that could be used in credential-stuffing attacks
- Preventing unauthorized access by prompting password resets or additional security controls
AI-driven risk scoring
AI-driven risk scoring assigns dynamic security ratings to vendors based on threat exposure, security hygiene, and past incidents. Machine learning models analyze historical and real-time data to assess a vendor's potential risk at any given moment. Your organization can then use those risk profiles and scores to inform decisions about vendor relationships, service levels, and continuing specific partnerships.
AI-driven risk scoring includes:
- Providing a quantifiable risk metric to compare vendors objectively
- Adjusting in real-time as new threats or security changes are detected
- Prioritizing high-risk vendors for further review or remediation efforts
Regulatory compliance tracking
Regulatory compliance tracking monitors vendor security practices against established cybersecurity frameworks and regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, NIST, ISO 27001, and DORA. Compliance tracking is especially vital for organizations in highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare. Tracking regulatory requirements ensures vendors continuously meet compliance standards and reduce legal and financial risks.
Regulatory compliance tracking includes:
- Detecting non-compliant vendors before they cause regulatory penalties
- Automating compliance audits by continuously assessing vendor adherence to security controls
- Reducing the manual effort required for compliance management
Continuous vendor security monitoring over one-time vendor reviews
Traditional vendor security assessments—typically conducted annually or periodically—leave organizations vulnerable to emerging cyber threats, compliance violations, and security misconfigurations that can go undetected for months.
Below, we summarize five key areas where continuous vendor monitoring outperforms one-time vendor reviews, ensuring a more proactive, resilient approach to TPRM programs.
Risk visibility
One-time vendor assessments provide only a snapshot of risk, offering no visibility into how a vendor’s security posture may evolve. Cyber threats, misconfigurations, and operational changes can occur at any moment, rendering a past assessment obsolete. Continuous monitoring eliminates this blind spot by offering real-time visibility into vendor security health, ensuring organizations are always aware of new vulnerabilities or risks.
This approach enables security teams to track fluctuations in a vendor’s risk level, adjust security measures accordingly, and make informed decisions based on the most current threat landscape. Without continuous oversight, businesses must rely solely on outdated assessments that often fail to reflect present-day security realities.
Treat detection
Threat detection is another area where continuous monitoring significantly outperforms one-time vendor reviews. A vendor deemed secure at the time of assessment can become compromised days, weeks, or months later, leaving organizations vulnerable without any warning. Cyber threats evolve rapidly, and static assessments do not account for newly discovered vulnerabilities, malware infections, or data security incidents that may emerge post-review.
Continuous monitoring integrates live threat intelligence to detect when a vendor’s environment has been compromised, allowing organizations to respond before an issue escalates. By maintaining a real-time pulse on vendor security, companies can take proactive steps to contain threats rather than discovering them only after significant reputational damage has been done.
Regulatory compliance
Regulatory compliance also greatly benefits from continuous vendor monitoring. Many cybersecurity frameworks and regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and DORA, require organizations to ensure that vendors maintain strong security postures at all times—not just at the moment of contract signing. A one-time assessment may confirm initial compliance, but it does nothing to ensure vendors uphold those standards in the following months.
Continuous monitoring helps organizations stay ahead of compliance risks by automatically tracking vendor adherence to security controls, identifying non-compliance as soon as it occurs, and facilitating timely remediation. This approach helps businesses avoid regulatory penalties and maintain a strong compliance posture.
Incident response
Continuous monitoring is far more effective for incident response, as it allows security teams to detect and react to vendor-related incidents in real time. When organizations rely on periodic reviews, they may not learn about a vendor’s security incident until long after it has already impacted their business.
Continuous monitoring enables immediate alerts when a vendor experiences a breach, data leak, or system vulnerability, allowing companies to take swift action to mitigate exposure and maintain business continuity. Faster response times mean organizations can limit potential damage, prevent further data loss, and implement countermeasures before attackers exploit security gaps.
Vendor accountability
Vendor accountability is another key area where continuous monitoring surpasses one-time reviews. While vendors may initially present a strong security posture during an onboarding assessment, their adherence to best practices may decline over time due to internal policy changes, personnel turnover, or evolving attack surfaces. Without continuous oversight, organizations have no way of ensuring that vendors maintain security commitments through their lifecycle.
Ongoing monitoring provides a mechanism to track vendor security performance over time, encouraging vendors to uphold their contractual obligations and swiftly address security lapses. By fostering a culture of evaluation and improvement, organizations can hold vendors to higher security standards and reduce the likelihood of security complacency.
UpGuard Vendor Risk enables continuous vendor security monitoring
As cyber threats evolve, relying on one-time vendor assessments is no longer enough to protect your organization from third-party risks. By implementing continuous vendor security monitoring, businesses can respond to incidents faster, hold vendors accountable, and make informed decisions based on current risk data rather than outdated assessments.
Organizations looking for a more dynamic approach to risk management processes should consider which monitoring tool best suits their specific needs. UpGuard Vendor Risk provides a comprehensive solution for continuous vendor monitoring, helping businesses stay ahead of emerging threats and maintain stronger third-party security postures.
Additional Vendor Risk features include:
- Security ratings: Instantly assess vendor security posture with dynamic, data-driven ratings powered by trusted threat intelligence and non-intrusive analysis.
- Third-party risk monitoring: Gain real-time insights into vendor security, track risks over time, and monitor any vendor instantly with our fully integrated platform.
- Risk assessment: Replace manual, spreadsheet-based risk assessments with guided workflows that document evidence, add commentary, and store results in UpGuard.
- Security questionnaires: Streamline the questionnaire process with automation, a comprehensive library, and risk identification tools to eliminate manual effort.
- Reporting and insights: Access tailored reports for different stakeholders in a centralized library, making third-party risk reporting seamless and efficient.
Learn more and get started today at https://www.upguard.com/contact-sales.
