Third-party risk management (TPRM) has become a key concern for organizations. As organizations increasingly “outsource” many functions, tools, infrastructure, processes, and even staffing to external partners, the risks — to cybersecurity, compliance, reputation, finance, and operations — to your organization associated with these relationships have grown exponentially.
Third-party risk covers a broad spectrum: from situations where a vendor, supplier, or service provider is compromised, granting attackers unauthorized access to your organization’s sensitive data; to disruptions caused by the downtime of a third-party tool your operations depend on; to poor vendor upgrade policies that result in widespread outages across your systems (remember the 2024 CrowdStrike patch incident).
To illustrate this necessity for TPRM, IDC’s July 2025 SaaS Path report shows that about 20% of organizations experienced third-party data breaches in recent years with their SaaS providers. And those events can carry a huge financial impact. Delta Airlines, for instance, estimated the CrowdStrike outage cost it $500 million.
