TPRM and security questionnaires have been initially developed to make sure thorough vetting of third-party relationships and real threat mitigation. However these instruments have expanded into complicated, redundant, and typically nonsensical paperwork which might be extra about optics than safety. Fairly than including worth, they usually function bureaucratic gestures towards compliance, including little perception into actual dangers.
The irony is that this auditing course of has led to a false sense of security. Corporations imagine that by finishing these checklists, they’ve coated their bases when in actuality they’re nonetheless uncovered to dangers these processes have been designed to mitigate. This isn’t simply ironic; it’s reckless, and we allowed it to occur.
The results of this checkbox tradition prolong past ineffective threat administration and have led to “questionnaire fatigue” amongst distributors. In lots of circumstances, security questionnaires are delivered as one-size-fits-all templates, an method that floods recipients with static, repetitive questions, lots of which aren’t related to their particular function or threat posture.
