🔍 Perform Vendor Risk Assessments: Conduct detailed assessments of all vendors to uncover potential security gaps and evaluate their compliance with your standards. 🔑 Enforce Access Controls and Monitoring: Set strict, role-based access limits for vendors and continuously monitor their activity within your systems, catching anomalies early. 🔄 Update Security Protocols Regularly: Regularly revise security protocols and ensure that all vendors adhere to these standards, maintaining robust defenses against emerging threats. 📜 Establish Vendor Agreements: Implement clear agreements that outline security requirements and accountability, ensuring vendors understand and commit to protecting your data.

I support the previous contributions in this post. So ti will add the following item: One of the best way to reduce risk from external vendors is to diversify its vendor base. The proverb tells us: "We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket".

- Have a proper "questionnaire" that you can put forward with your vendor to understand how they are going to use your database/system. This need not be one time exercise as the cyber security threat vectors are changing very fast. - Understand the vendor's internal data protection and privacy guardrails to make sure there are no direct or indirect injections from their systems to your database /system. - Enforce Role-Based-Access-Control + a secure transport channel + multi-factor authentication for the vendors to your system. - Have a solid firewall in your landscape to detect some of the attacks the firewall can sense and stop/block the source system's requests.

Securing data architecture from external vendor risks requires a proactive, multi-layered strategy. Start by conducting rigorous risk assessments on each vendor to uncover potential vulnerabilities before they impact your systems. Next, enforce robust access controls—only grant vendors the minimum level of access necessary, and continuously monitor their activities. Regularly update security protocols and hold vendors to these standards through compliance checks. This vigilant approach ensures that external partnerships don’t compromise your organization’s data security.