High Effort, Low Confidence: The Reality of Traditional TPRM
The truth about third-party risk management is that traditional TPRM processes were never designed for today’s vendor ecosystems. Organizations now rely on dozens—or hundreds—of third parties to deliver critical services, process sensitive data, and support core operations. Yet many TPRM programs still depend on static questionnaires, annual reviews, and manual follow-ups that consume enormous internal effort while delivering limited, and often outdated, insight. Where externally validated audit reporting is available, we must still review this documentation and map it to our own assessment and/or compliance criteria.
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Security and compliance teams are forced to chase vendors for responses, interpret subjective answers, and reconcile inconsistent evidence while real-world risk continues to evolve outside the confines of a spreadsheet. These approaches struggle to scale, delay decision-making, and leave organizations exposed to blind spots around breach likelihood, external vulnerabilities, and downstream impact. The result is a high-effort, low-confidence process that fails to keep pace with modern threat realities.
A Smarter Model for Managing Third-Party Risk
TrueInsight replaces manual, episodic vendor reviews with a fully managed, intelligence-driven approach to third-party risk management. Delivered as-a-service by Heighten Security, TrueInsight combines expert-led oversight with advanced risk intelligence and automation to validate, augment, and accelerate traditional TPRM workflows.
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At the core of the service is a technology platform provided by our partners at Black Kite that continuously monitors third-party security posture using external intelligence sources, technical telemetry, and automated artifact analysis. This intelligence is correlated with compliance evidence such as SOC 2 reports, ISO certifications, and custom questionnaires to produce consistent, comparable risk and compliance scoring across your vendor ecosystem.
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Rather than replacing governance, TrueInsight enhances it. The service enables faster onboarding, deeper insight, and ongoing visibility into how vendor risk changes over time. The result is a practical, defensible view of third-party risk that supports procurement, compliance, security, and executive decision-making.
Key capabilities and deliverables:
Vendor onboarding and baseline assessment
Rapid onboarding of third parties with minimal input required, establishing an initial risk and compliance baseline.
Continuous external risk intelligence
Ongoing monitoring of vendors for vulnerabilities, breach indicators, threat exposure, and changes in security posture.
Compliance and evidence analysis
Automated processing of audit reports, policy documentation, and questionnaires mapped to standards such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST, and custom internal criteria.
Risk quantification and prioritization
Clear, at-a-glance scoring that highlights relative risk, likelihood of incidents, and estimated impact to support informed decisions.
Analyst-led assessment and validation
Heighten security experts review findings, contextualize results, and engage vendors to validate data and address gaps.
Ongoing monitoring and alerting
Continuous tracking with alerts when material risk factors change, new issues emerge, or thresholds are exceeded.
Actionable reporting for stakeholders
Executive-ready dashboards and reporting aligned to audit, compliance, procurement, and risk committees.
How Heighten can help
Heighten Security delivers TrueInsight TPRM-as-a-Service as an extension of your team, integrating seamlessly with your existing risk management, compliance, and vendor governance processes. Our expert team adds years of experience in managing third-party risks, providing hands-on, assessments leveraging the intelligence and tools at our disposal. Our team handles everything, including vendor follow-ups and collection of evidence and artifacts. TrueInsight enables organizations to reduce operational overhead, improve confidence in vendor decisions, and maintain continuous oversight of third-party risk without building or staffing a dedicated internal program.
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