T hird-party relationships have always been an essential part of modern business. Today, however, they have become one of the most significant sources of cyber-risk. As organisations accelerate cloud adoption, embrace SaaS platforms and integrate AI-powered services into everyday operations, their digital ecosystems have expanded far beyond traditional corporate boundaries. The result is a supply chain that stretches across multiple vendors, subcontractors and cloud providers, creating layers of exposure that many organisations neither fully understand nor continuously monitor.
For CISOs, managing third-party risk is no longer about completing annual questionnaires or satisfying compliance requirements. It has become a continuous exercise in understanding how every external relationship could introduce new vulnerabilities into the enterprise.
The expanding attack surface
According to Meriam ElOuazzani, Vice President for Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Censys, the challenge is no longer simply about direct suppliers.
For CISOs, managing external risk has evolved far beyond annual vendor assessments. It now requires continuous visibility, intelligence-driven monitoring and a security strategy that extends well beyond the corporate perimeter.
“ What has changed most dramatically isn’ t the concept of third-party risk. It’ s the depth of the chain. Organisations used to worry about their direct vendors. Now they’ re inheriting exposure from vendors’ vendors, and their vendors after that. The perimeter dissolved quietly, and most governance frameworks never caught up.”
She recalls meeting a customer with around 200 vendors, where three different internal teams gave three different answers when asked which suppliers actually had access to production environments. Against that backdrop, Verizon’ s finding that third-party involvement in breaches has doubled is hardly surprising.
Meriam ElOuazzani, Vice President for Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Censys
Will Davies, Deputy CISO and Head of Enterprise Security at Endava, believes the complexity stems from the way organisations now consume technology.
Businesses no longer purchase standalone products. Instead, suppliers are deeply integrated into business applications, cloud environments
Will Davies, Deputy CISO and Head of Enterprise Security at Endava
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