Today, virtually every business depends to some degree on third parties for supporting products and services. In some cases, these third parties supply something simple, such as office supplies, cleaning services or equipment repair. There are, however, vendors whose products or services are critical to the operation of a business. A simple example is phone service — one carrier holds your main phone number, and their failure to perform could jeopardize your business.

Dependence on third parties is not new, but in the last few years has come more into focus for a variety of reasons, including the advent of cloud-based services critical to business users, and regulatory/compliance requirements mandating oversight of these entities. The compliance aspect specifically has generated a flurry of activity, with organizations mandated by various standards to conduct third party oversight, including:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…