How To Get Information From Your Vendors on High-Profile Security Events With Black Kite’s FocusTags™

Reaching out to vendors about new risks caused by high-profile events can be awkward. It can feel like telling a first date that they have something in their teeth — or telling a new neighbor that their lawn is ugly. More importantly, it’s time-consuming to talk to all your vendors about all your security concerns without tarnishing critical relationships.

Organizations must mitigate that awkwardness and make conversations as productive as possible by going in armed with data and solid information on the high-profile event in question.

That’s where Black Kite’s FocusTags™ come in.

FocusTags™ are a fast and simple way for security teams to track high-profile cyber events — and quickly identify affected vendors within their supply chain. FocusTags™ help facilitate better conversations with vendors around high-profile security events because they provide your security teams with the specific details on risk they need to have a direct conversation.

Identify Your Critical Vendors — And Start Working Together

Today, an individual organization can have anywhere from 20 to 200 vendors in its entire tech ecosystem. That can make it next to impossible for even the most seasoned security professionals to quickly and efficiently get the intelligence they need to respond to the impact of high-profile events in their supply chain in real time. Without the right information, these professionals have to reach out to each vendor individually, ask what they are doing to manage the new risk factor, and then keep track of that information — which is typically shared via a normal email!

FocusTags™ help security teams facilitate conversations with vendors around high-profile security events by immediately identifying impacted vendors and finding the specific details on what risks that impacted vendor might pose to their organization. This way the conversation can be more directed and productive.

Filter Through Tech Ecosystems and Automate Continuous Monitoring

FocusTags™ filter through tech ecosystems and flag only the vendors that actually need monitoring in the event of a high-profile security incident. Security teams can also add custom tags to prioritize specific critical vendors, including those that hold large amounts of PII or those that have internal systems access.

With FocusTags™, security teams can enact true continuous monitoring of their critical vendors and relevant high-profile cyber events, unlocking the real-time insights organizations need to make fast critical decisions. This helps organizations leverage the power of automation to filter and collect critical event data and then identify affected vendors in a matter of moments.

Instead of needing to send countless vendors questionnaires after a high-profile event, security teams can work with greater efficiency with FocusTags™ as they illuminate affected vendors — and how they’re affected — near real time.

Initiate Speedy Incident Response

Speed and facility with incident response is especially important when addressing high-profile security events, as many of these include zero days where time is of the absolute essence. When security teams can reduce the noise in the threat landscape and focus only on important signals, they can secure their cyber ecosystems with greater power and ease.

Most importantly, they can start to build stronger relationships with their vendors and their vendors’ security teams — enabling the teamwork that’s essential to mitigating mounting threats in an increasingly connected tech landscape. With FocusTags™, security teams won’t have to beat around the bush when connecting with affected vendors. They’ll be armed with the data and information they need to get straight to the heart of the issue with speed and efficiency. That allows both organizations and their vendors to quickly come up with game plans to resolve potential issues — an area in which time is of the absolute essence.

Engage in Productive Conversations With FocusTags™

When organizations prepare communication plans around high-profile security events ahead of time, they can make conversations productive, respectful, and relationship-affirming. Reaching out to vendors with both hyper-specific questions and rock-solid data helps swiftly and efficiently unravel critical risk information. That way, contacting a vendor isn’t an interrogation — it’s an offering for a strategic, collaborative partnership.

Ultimately, FocusTags™ help security teams better communicate with vendors, encouraging a partnership that has the potential to seriously mitigate and reduce the impact of high-profile security events — and eliminate those unproductive conversations that waste everyone’s time.