Third-Party Risk Management Lite
Your vendors are part of your attack surface. Manage them properly.
Request a quoteThe problem
Every supplier, SaaS tool, and outsourced provider is a potential entry point to your business. Most SMEs have no visibility into their third-party risk: no vendor inventory, no security assessments, and no contractual protections. When a supplier is breached, your data goes with them — and your customers expect you to be accountable. The risk is real and growing as SMEs rely on more cloud tools and outsourced services.
Our methodology
- Vendor inventory workshop — identifying and listing all third parties with access to your data or systems
- Criticality tiering — categorising vendors as critical, high, medium, or low risk based on access level and data sensitivity
- Right-sized vendor questionnaire development — proportionate to SME vendor relationships, not 200-question enterprise forms
- Assessment workflow design — how to send, track, chase, and score vendor responses
- Results tracking dashboard setup
- Contract clause library — key security provisions to include in vendor agreements
What you will receive
- Vendor inventory register
- Criticality tiering matrix with scoring rationale
- Vendor security questionnaire template (short-form for low-risk, detailed for critical)
- Assessment workflow — step-by-step process for running vendor reviews
- Results dashboard template
- Recommended contract security clauses (for review by your legal counsel)
Estimated timeline
4 weeks from engagement start
Overview
Your organisation’s security is only as strong as the controls your vendors maintain. If a cloud provider, payment processor, or IT supplier is breached, the data they hold on your behalf is at risk — and your customers will hold you accountable.
Third-Party Risk Management Lite gives SMEs a structured, practical way to manage vendor risk without the enterprise overhead.
Why “Lite”?
Enterprise third-party risk programmes involve teams of assessors, dedicated GRC platforms, hundreds of controls, and ongoing managed services. That is the right approach for a bank managing 500 regulated vendors.
It is not the right approach for a Tanzanian SME managing a handful of cloud tools and a few key service providers.
This programme is sized for reality: a structured process that covers the risk materially, uses your team’s time efficiently, and produces results you can act on — without becoming a full-time job.
What We Build
We start by understanding who your vendors actually are — often this surfaces suppliers that different teams have onboarded independently without central visibility. We then tier them by the risk they represent to your business, build a proportionate assessment process, and give you the templates and workflow to run it quarter after quarter.
The contract clause library is particularly valuable: simple, plain-English security provisions you can ask your legal counsel to include in new vendor agreements, covering incident notification, audit rights, and data return on termination.
After the Engagement
You have a running programme. Your team knows which vendors to assess, when, and how. Findings from assessments feed into your risk register (which we can set up as part of the vCISO retainer). Vendor risk becomes a managed function, not a blind spot.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a third party for this program?
Any organisation or service that has access to your business data, systems, or premises. This includes: SaaS tools (accounting software, HR platforms, customer databases), cloud providers, outsourced IT support or managed service providers, payment processors, professional services firms with access to sensitive information, and any supplier whose failure or breach could significantly impact your operations.
How do we get vendors to respond to security questionnaires?
Vendor response rates are a common challenge. We build this into the workflow: questionnaires are short and proportionate to the vendor relationship, the covering letter explains why you are asking and frames it as a normal business practice, and the workflow includes follow-up steps. For critical vendors who refuse to engage, we provide guidance on escalating and, if necessary, reconsidering the relationship.
Do you assess the vendors for us, or do we do it ourselves?
The standard engagement delivers the process and tooling — you run assessments using the questionnaire and workflow we design. For businesses without the internal capacity to manage the ongoing programme, we offer a managed service as part of our vCISO retainer where we run the quarterly assessment cycle on your behalf.
We only have a handful of key vendors. Is this overkill?
Not at all. Even 5–10 vendors with access to your customer data or financial systems warrant structured oversight. The program scales to your reality — we would not build a 100-vendor process for a business with 8 suppliers. The inventory and tiering exercise alone often surfaces vendors that stakeholders had forgotten about.
What about vendors who say they are ISO 27001 certified? Does that mean we do not need to assess them?
ISO 27001 certification is a meaningful signal, but it is not a substitute for due diligence. Certifications tell you the vendor has a security management system — they do not tell you the scope of that certification, whether it covers the services they provide to you, or whether their practices have materially changed since certification. We include a section in the questionnaire that captures certification status and scope, and our guidance explains how to weight it appropriately.
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Ready to get started?
All engagements begin with a free 30-minute discovery call. No commitment, no jargon — just an honest conversation about your situation.