The Vendor You Forgot About Might Be Your Biggest Risk
A field note on third-party relationships, risk, and reality.
Every organization works with vendors. IT support, imaging, billing, cloud storage, specialized software—no one builds alone anymore.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is that every vendor you onboard becomes an extension of your infrastructure. Their uptime? Their security posture? Their sloppy password habits or five-year-old servers? If they have access to your systems or data, their risks become your risks.
And yet, most organizations manage their vendors like background noise—until something breaks. Or someone clicks. Or no one knows who still has access to what.
Let’s talk about what happens when vendor relationships are left unmanaged—and what you should be doing instead.
🧨 When the Vendor Isn’t the Problem—But Still Causes One
We once worked with a client whose third-party vendor pushed an update to a critical service… without informing anyone. It wasn’t a breach. It wasn’t even a bad update. But it quietly caused an outage in the middle of a clinical workflow.
Why? Because no one internally had visibility into vendor change management. No one owned the relationship. And no one had built a process around “what if the vendor makes a change we’re not ready for?”
That’s the part people forget: you don’t have to be hacked to be impacted.
🤝 Vendor Relationships Are Like Dating (The Long-Term Kind)
In the beginning, vendors are charming. Great slide decks. Quick replies. A shiny portal.
Fast forward 18 months:
The contract lives in someone’s inbox
Your main point of contact left the company
Admin access was never revoked for the last project
And no one knows what this thing is even doing anymore
This isn’t about people being careless. It’s about having no structure for long-term oversight. And that’s where a CIO or CISO should step in.
🔍 The Most Common Vendor Oversight Gaps
No current vendor inventory – You’re guessing. You’re probably wrong.
No contract visibility – You have no idea what SLAs, breach obligations, or access rights are baked into those agreements.
No offboarding process – Vendors walk away, but their access often doesn’t.
No performance or security reviews – If a vendor hasn’t been reviewed in two years, how do you know they’re still a fit?
🛠️ What Should Be Happening Instead
If a vendor touches your infrastructure, your systems, or your data—they need to be treated like part of the team. That means:
A complete vendor inventory (with purpose, risk level, and internal owner)
Reviewed contracts that include breach notifications, SLAs, and security clauses
Documented offboarding procedures (for access, credentials, and data)
Annual reviews of performance, fit, and risk—not just cost
Security assessments and BAAs for any vendor handling sensitive data
And yes, this is where a CIO or CISO should step in—to own the process, enforce standards, and make sure these relationships are working for the organization, not against it.
Don’t have one in-house? That’s exactly where virtual CIO and CISO services come in. More on that in a minute.
🐴 What We’ve Seen (and Fixed)
At Ferrous Equine Technologies, we’ve helped organizations:
Discover more than 100 undocumented vendors (yep, really)
Reclaim unnecessary licenses and admin access from past providers
Set up lightweight but effective vendor review processes
Evaluate vendors for compliance, risk, and strategic fit
Make vendor management part of strategic IT—not just accounting cleanup
It’s not about locking everything down. It’s about making sure your vendors are aligned, secure, and accountable—just like the rest of your operation.
Final Thought: If They Can Break You, They’re Part of You
Whether it’s a missed alert, a bad update, or a vendor with poor security hygiene, the impact lands on you. That’s why vendor oversight isn’t optional. It’s leadership.
And if you don’t have someone playing that leadership role today—it’s time to bring one in.
👉 Need help bringing vendor strategy, security, and structure under control?
Our vCIO and vCISO services are designed to fill that leadership gap—providing experienced oversight, policy, and strategy for third-party management without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Let’s clean up the vendor chaos—and make it work for you.