Third-party access governance: are your vendor controls keeping up?

TL;DR: Third-party access to corporate networks expands the attack surface through broad VPN access, shared accounts, long-lived credentials, and weak visibility, according to Securden and cited source material. Least privilege, JIT access, phishing-resistant MFA, secure brokering, and automated offboarding are now baseline controls, not optional hardening.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Securden: Best Practices for Third-Party Access to Corporate Networks

By the numbers:

• 80% faster deployment for vendor access management is cited for the unified platform approach described in the article.
• 60% lower total cost of ownership is cited for the same consolidated third-party access model.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams govern third-party identity access?

A: Security teams should inventory every external identity path, assign an internal owner, and apply scope, expiry, and revocation rules to each connection.

Q: Why do vendor accounts create higher breach risk than internal user accounts?

A: Vendor accounts often combine external connectivity, broad permissions, and weaker lifecycle oversight, which makes them attractive to attackers and hard to govern.

Q: What do organisations get wrong about third-party offboarding?

A: They often treat offboarding as a manual cleanup step instead of a control objective.

Practitioner guidance

• Enforce task-bound vendor entitlements Map each third-party role to a minimal permission set, then expire that access automatically when the contract, project, or support window closes.
• Replace broad VPN access with brokered paths Route vendor sessions through controlled access paths that expose only the required application or system, not the internal network as a whole.
• Require phishing-resistant MFA for privileged vendors Use keys, certificates, or other strong factors for elevated third-party accounts, and reserve OTP-style methods for lower-risk access only.

What's in the full article

Securden's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• A fuller breakdown of its unified vendor access, PAM, IAM, and CIEM control model for third-party identities.
• Step-by-step examples for JIT access, secure brokering, and automatic deprovisioning in vendor workflows.
• More implementation detail on phishing-resistant MFA, session monitoring, and access inventory management.
• Practical guidance on tying vendor offboarding to procurement and contract lifecycle events.

👉 Read Securden's analysis of third-party access governance and vendor identity controls →

Third-party access governance: are your vendor controls keeping up?

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