Today, more businesses are embracing the digital revolution than ever before. Having a well-planned cloud connectivity and infrastructure strategy in place is key to growing and thriving in today’s modern economy. Engaging with partners and vendors via the cloud is critical, and the sheer number of connected businesses isn’t dwindling. Nearly 70% of businesses use at least one public and one privately protected cloud server. A staggering 84% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy in place for 2019 and beyond.

While multi-cloud strategies may sound overwhelming, they are actually becoming a necessity for businesses to operate at the highest level. According to a recent Kentik survey taken at AWS re:Invent, enterprise businesses are pairing AWS with other cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, to manage business needs and deployments. The survey also points out that multi-cloud deployments involving one or more cloud tenant are becoming more common as businesses face more challenges and opportunities.

Vendor Risk Management Challenges

There are some downsides to managing so many cloud partnerships and connections. One of the biggest challenges involved is running unique security questionnaires for cloud vendors. On average, every single cloud vendor security assessment requires an average of 17 man hours to complete, with a variety of different project management and data collection tools. With so many cloud-based vendor relationships, this can mean weeks of employee time eaten up by manual responses. The average organization evaluates around 17 new vendors every year. This means nearly 300 hours a year spent on security questionnaires.

As cloud connectivity becomes more important (and more widespread), it’s now more critical than ever to manage these processes efficiently. While many organizations are on the front lines of cloud innovation, they’re still working with disjointed, disparate systems, spreadsheets, and knowledge bases. Often times, even if there are processes in place, they’re reactive, static structures that only work to alleviate some of the headache after the heavy lifting is all but complete. Risk scoring and comprehensive vendor risk management strategies can add structure to this complicated, constantly changing space.

The Future of Automation

Risk scoring is part of a larger compliance and security strategy that predicts how "at-risk" an organization is for potential security threats and breaches. Having a risk management strategy in place is the first step in building a proactive, flexible vendor cloud security management system that can scale and grow as your business assesses and adds new cloud vendors. One foundational part of this process is automation. Automation not only allows the crucial elements of vendor risk management (data gathering, modeling, and risk scoring) to operate at a high level, it also enables security teams and employees to spend their time on other hands-on tasks without worrying about anything slipping through the cracks.

How Whistic Helps

The Whistic platform helps organizations of all sizes automate vendor risk management processes by streamlining every single aspect of this workflow, from intake forms to task delegation to risk scoring. Additionally, with API integrations and secure documentation upload features, Whistic is built to work with multiple cloud service providers and industry standard questionnaires, making it easy for organizations to be confident in their cloud partnerships without sacrificing accuracy or security.

Request a live demo with a Whistic Product Specialist.