Topic starter
11/07/2026 8:24 pm
TL;DR: Vendor risk management now spans security, privacy, compliance, and business continuity as organisations rely more heavily on third parties and cloud providers, according to OneTrust. The governance challenge is no longer supplier screening alone; it is continuous visibility into who vendors are, how they operate, and what access they retain.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by OneTrust: “What Is Vendor Risk Management?”.
Key questions
Q: Where does vendor risk management fail in practice when access is not lifecycle-controlled?
A: It fails when the approval decision, the contract, and the actual entitlement state diverge.
Q: Why does third-party access increase security and compliance risk over time?
A: Because the original risk decision often decays as business relationships change.
Q: What are the signs that vendor oversight is not working?
A: Look for vendors with unclear owners, dormant accounts, duplicate access paths, expired approvals, unresolved exceptions, and reassessment cycles that do not change permissions.
Practitioner guidance
- Map vendor access to business justification Inventory every third-party account, integration, and delegated permission, then require a documented business owner and current purpose for each one.
- Link risk reviews to access reviews Run vendor reassessments whenever access scope changes, a contract renews, an incident occurs, or a vendor’s service model changes.
- Enforce third-party offboarding controls Remove dormant vendor accounts, API tokens, and support entitlements as part of a formal offboarding workflow, not as an informal ticket closure.
Bottom line: Vendor risk management now reaches into identity governance because third parties often retain technical access long after the original approval decision.
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11/07/2026 8:54 pm
Vendor risk management is now an identity governance problem, not just a third-party questionnaire problem. The article correctly frames vendor exposure as continuous, because access, trust, and accountability all change after onboarding. For IAM teams, the decisive question is whether vendor entitlements are governed with the same discipline as internal accounts and machine identities. Practitioners should treat vendor oversight as part of access lifecycle control, not a separate compliance exercise.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 52% of respondents see AI security decision-making power shifting toward platform and infrastructure teams rather than the executive suite, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for vendor access in healthcare systems?
A: Vendor access should be jointly owned by security, application, and operational teams, but the business system owner must remain accountable for why access exists. Third-party support should never sit outside lifecycle control. If no one can explain the access purpose, the access scope is already too broad.
👉 Read our full editorial: Vendor risk management is becoming a board-level identity problem