Vendor Management Augments Secure Business Environment

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Business processes increasingly involve use of information and communication technologies within and outside of the organizations for enriched and instant communication for business transactions. Business partners now span globally across geographical boundaries. The healthcare industries increasingly depend on business skills outside of their core areas, for business growth. Globalization has facilitated vendors to be involved in various aspects of the business transaction with access to critical business data, personal or private health information of the workforce. Vendor Management, therefore, as a discipline is now emerging as an involved and integrated process of the overall business management of the organization.Under such circumstances the security and privacy of data access and transfer is more than important today. In such a scenario, vendor management is a challenge faced by these new age enterprises.

Vendor Management is a process, which enables global organizations to control cost, achieve service excellence, while understanding and mitigating the risks involved in data sharing with third-party service ...
... providers. The ability to understand various aspects in the outsourcing lifecycle, determines the success of vendor management. Service providers in the healthcare industry such as, insurance clearing houses, enterprises handling health care solutions, and conducting clinical research that use patient health information (PHI) directly or indirectly are considered as a “Business Associate” or “Covered Entity”. These along with the hospitals, small and large medical providers are expected to meet HIPAA compliance regulations and maintain IT security and compliance .

To maintain IT security, enterprises today aim to be compliant with highly dependable vendor management processes in place. The HIPAA compliance, along with HITECH compliance, paves way for stricter enforcement of laws, maximization penalties, and changing responsibilities and liabilities of Business Associates and third -party vendors. Apart from this, the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) also help enterprises to manage security breaches from unauthorized acquisition, access, use, or disclosure of protected health information by any vendor. All these steps towards compliance ensure that global enterprises have a strong vendor management system in place.

With the growing number of data breaches related to outsourcing and third-party service providers, assessing the risk of vendors is seen as a growing problem for enterprise compliance management. The solutions offered by the leading service providers take the enterprises through an effective vendor management process. This includes risk-based selection of vendors, centralized document management and remediation management. Further, the automated monitoring of sensitive data and technical controls help vendor- managers to assess vendors, manage risks, measure level of vendor compliance to regulations and track and identify non-compliance areas.

To overcome issues of security and IT compliance, enterprises need to have vendor management as a standard practice. This will help them achieve their business objectives effectively, minimize business disruption, besides ensuring sustainable outsourcing practices by driving value from vendors.

Read more about- ISO 27002, threat management