As enterprises expand their digital ecosystems, vendor risk management (VRM) and third-party risk management (TPRM) have taken center stage. Traditional methods of managing third-party risk, such as annual questionnaires and spreadsheet tracking—are no longer sufficient. Today’s threat landscape demands a smarter approach that combines automation, AI, and continuous monitoring. In this blog, we explore how forward-thinking organizations are redefining their TPRM programs with the latest tools and strategies.
For many organizations, third-party risk assessments are still manual, slow, and overly reliant on static data. Annual risk reviews, one-size-fits-all questionnaires, and spreadsheets may check a compliance box, but they offer limited visibility into evolving risks or a vendor’s real-time security posture.
This reactive approach poses various risks for enterprises operating in regulated industries or those with global supply chains. It doesn’t scale well and makes it difficult to respond quickly to incidents, enforce controls, or prove due diligence under frameworks like ISO 27001, SOC 2, or DORA.
To solve these challenges, modern tools and strategies are necessary to streamline processes and reduce manual effort, enhance visibility into vendor security and compliance, and enable faster response and decisions. These include:
Bulk onboarding and automation make it easy to evaluate new vendors by processing large volumes of third-party data and automatically capturing key information like data access, criticality, and geography—without the need for manual input or review. This enables teams to:
Launch standardized onboarding across hundreds of vendors simultaneously
Streamline risk classification and triage
Reduce time to engagement without compromising diligence
Cyber GRC platforms like 6clicks with built-in third-party risk solutions, equip organizations with the capability to bulk import their vendors directly as well as perform bulk assessments. With 6clicks, you can catalog and assess your vendors, use custom risk scoring to categorize them, and manage and remediate associated risks, all in one place.
Assessment fatigue stems from the time and effort spent answering not just numerous questions, but the same ones over and over. AI is changing this by improving how both vendors and enterprises approach assessments, making the process faster, smarter, and eliminating duplication.
Tools like 6clicks’ Hailey AI assist vendors in generating context-aware responses based on previous submissions, uploaded documentation, and regulatory mappings. This not only accelerates questionnaire completion but ensures more consistent and higher-quality data, which is critical for accurate risk scoring and reporting.
For internal teams, AI identifies gaps, flags anomalies, and recommends next steps. Hailey AI can identify risks and issues from vendor assessments and automatically create and link those records with their associated vendors, enabling faster triage and enhancing traceability and visibility across third-party risk management activities. Based on risk and issue records, Hailey can then also create complete, properly sequenced remediation tasks—ensuring prompt mitigation, prioritization, and streamlined risk workflows.
All in all, this enhances:
Speed and accuracy of vendor responses
Internal review efficiency
Overall quality of assessment data
Timely detection and response to emerging risks
Risk isn’t one-size-fits-all, and your assessments shouldn’t be either. By tailoring questionnaires based on a vendor’s role, access level, or business impact, risk teams can focus on what's relevant, cutting down on noise and improving response rates.
Contextual assessments, on the other hand, allow you to align with multiple frameworks without duplicating effort. For example, a vendor operating in both the EU and the US can be assessed once, with responses mapped to both GDPR and HIPAA using control mapping features built into modern platforms.
6clicks allows you to do both. With support for both question-based and requirement-based assessments, you can easily create your own vendor assessment templates and link each question directly to specific framework provisions and your individual controls, ensuring more tailored responses that align with compliance requirements.
Benefits of contextual assessments include:
Reduced friction for low-risk vendors
More rigorous scrutiny for high-risk relationships
Smarter resource allocation for risk teams
Static questionnaires can only provide a snapshot in time. That’s why more organizations are combining traditional assessments with continuous monitoring tools that leverage threat intelligence feeds, vulnerability scans, and real-time surveillance. These tools scan IT environments for indicators of compromise, changes in security posture, or data breaches related to your third parties. This hybrid approach provides a more accurate and dynamic risk profile and creates a proactive feedback loop that alerts teams to emerging vendor risks before they escalate.
Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) with 6clicks empowers organizations to automatically validate the effectiveness of their controls and get a real-time view of their compliance posture. Powered by our integrations with cloud security tools such as Wiz and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, teams can conduct automated control tests and get instant notifications of configuration errors, control failures, and security incidents, enabling faster response to critical issues and ensuring ongoing compliance.
In third-party risk management, trust is a two-way street. Enterprises need assurance that their vendors are secure and compliant, but just as importantly, customers and regulators need to trust that the enterprise is doing its due diligence. That’s where vendor trust portals come in.
A vendor trust portal acts as a centralized, self-service hub where third parties can securely share compliance evidence, creating a living record of vendor accountability that enterprises can easily demonstrate to internal stakeholders, customers, and regulators. It helps organizations:
Avoid last-minute evidence collection during audits or client reviews
Maintain up-to-date, centralized records of vendor compliance
Strengthen credibility with customers and regulators
The 6clicks Trust Portal enables users to easily create Trust profiles and upload documentation such as control implementation, audit findings, certifications, and more. These records can be shared publicly or privately via secure links, promoting transparency and reducing the back-and-forth typically involved in due diligence.
Managing risk across business units, regions, and vendor types requires a centralized view. Platforms like 6clicks provide powerful reports and dashboards that surface:
Risk scores and statuses
Control performance and compliance gaps
Assessment progress
Ongoing treatment plans and remediation timelines
These dashboards and reports can also be customized by geography, business unit, or criticality, helping teams meet specific reporting requirements and instantly access key insights. With 6clicks’ one-click report generation and customizable dashboards, you can communicate risk posture and other metrics readily to the board, regulators, or partners, empowering better decision-making and audit readiness.
Moreover, 6clicks enables seamless integration of third-party oversight with your broader cyber GRC program, allowing you to link vendor risks to vendor profiles, controls, compliance requirements, issue and incident logs, and assets. This ensures TPRM isn’t siloed but fully embedded into your broader risk management ecosystem.
With the current landscape, successful TPRM programs today and in the future will be defined by their ability to adapt and scale. With AI, automation, and continuous intelligence, organizations can:
Onboard and assess vendors more efficiently at scale
Deliver tailored, relevant risk assessments based on business context
Fast-track the assessment process and reduce manual work
Immediately remediate and monitor vendor risk continuously, and in addition,
Foster stakeholder confidence with trust portals
Enable data-driven decision-making through comprehensive reports and dashboards
If your current TPRM approach is still bound to static forms and spreadsheets, now is the time to evolve. AI-powered solutions like 6clicks offer the tools needed to transform vendor risk into a strategic advantage.
Discover how 6clicks can reshape your TPRM strategy for 2025 and beyond:
Streamline vendor risk management with bulk processing and automated workflows, turnkey templates, and unrestricted data customization
Maintain risk registers, implement controls, and assess alignment with requirements in one centralized platform for risk management, compliance, and audit readiness
Get free access to ready-to-use content such as standards and regulations, control sets, and more
Multi-framework mapping, assessment responses, risk and issue identification, risk treatment plans, and more, all done within seconds using next-generation AI
Provide assurance with executive-ready reports, real-time dashboards, and a dedicated Trust Portal