Why Is This Still So Difficult?

That’s the right direction, and we all agree, but it’s hard to do in practice. Why? Because most security functions are still consumed by day-to-day activity, stretched resources and competing priorities. And too often we lack a clear line of sight between what the team is doing and the business processes, services, assets and dependencies that matter most. From my perspective, without that line of sight, risk assessments, penetration testing, control reviews, etc., become too generic, lack strong direction and purpose, or, even worse, focus on areas of the business that just aren’t that critical and may benefit from applying baseline controls.

Cyber Risk Doesn’t Exist in Isolation…

It’s made harder by the fact that cyber risk rarely exists in isolation. The risks we deal with now are hybrid and cut across cyber, technology risk, operational resilience, physical security, third-party management, enterprise risk, compliance, and audit, and yet, many of these functions still report vertically, with little lateral sharing. That makes it genuinely difficult to build a joined-up picture of what’s truly critical, how it’s protected, where the dependencies run, and where we’re most exposed.

The uncomfortable truth is that no one can secure everything to the same standard. So, prioritisation isn’t optional; it’s our job to perform. Yet our assurance effort often follows the wrong triggers. A new application attracts a risk assessment, a pen test, or a code review simply because it’s new, while a mission-critical system that’s underpinned the business for a decade hasn’t been tested in years. The result is a mismatch between where we point assurance and where the real exposure lives.

Start with What Matters Most

The place to start is by identifying the business’s nucleus: the critical services, processes, data, systems, people, and third-party dependencies that must be protected and kept running at all costs. This requires discussion, challenge, and consensus across business, technology, risk, and resilience teams. It won’t be perfect the first time, but skipping it because it’s hard leaves us with no defensible basis for prioritisation at all.

Once we understand what’s most critical, risk assessment starts to earn its keep. The point isn’t to generate another risk register; it’s to work out what could realistically go wrong, how likely it is, what it would cost the business, and which controls we need to prevent, detect, and respond. That’s what connects business criticality to threat exposure, control effectiveness and remediation priorities.

It also gives us a far stronger story to tell regulators, boards, and auditors, which broadly follows a clear line from what matters most to the business, through the risks we’ve identified, to the controls we’ve put in place and the investment we’ve chosen to make. It’s the difference between security as a broad compliance exercise and security as focused business protection.

The Goal

This must ultimately be our goal now in cybersecurity: a cybersecurity programme that’s more practical, more connected, and more targeted. One that’s built around understanding what the business genuinely cannot afford to lose, how those critical services and assets are exposed, and where our time, effort and investment will have the greatest impact. That means moving beyond security activities driven primarily by compliance schedules or technology change and instead focusing assurance where it matters most.

We’ll never have unlimited resources, nor will we ever eliminate every risk. But by establishing a clear line of sight between business criticality, credible threat scenarios and the controls that protect them, we can make better decisions, justify investment more effectively and build resilience where it counts.

This is what good cybersecurity should be about: not trying to secure everything equally, but making informed, defensible decisions that protect what matters most to the organisation.

The pressure to appear ‘secure’

Third parties operate in competitive environments where demonstrating security maturity has become a commercial necessity. Suppliers therefore face implicit pressure to present themselves as operationally robust, even when controls may still be evolving or inconsistently applied.

As a result, self-assessment questionnaires and maturity declarations can sometimes reflect aspirational practices rather than actual control effectiveness. Cultural factors reinforce this dynamic when internal teams feel compelled to align responses with contractual commitments or service-level agreements (SLAs).

The organisations issuing these questionnaires typically do so in a standardised format designed to streamline the process, recognising they may not have the capacity to review large volumes of supporting evidence or conduct detailed follow-ups with every supplier.

Consequently, customer organisations often rely heavily on declared security postures unless assurance processes include operational validation along with documentation.

Third-party providers may also feel pressure to avoid disclosing operational weaknesses, particularly when doing so could threaten contractual relationships. Without evidence-based validation or contractual audit rights, responses to control-maturity questionnaires may present an overly optimistic view of the security posture.

Ransomware and asymmetric exposure in third-party relationships

Ransomware has become the dominant third-party cyber risk scenario for many organisations. Suppliers often serve as a more accessible point of compromise, particularly when security investment and maturity differ significantly between the customer and the provider.

Compromising a single supplier can also provide attackers with access to multiple client environments, creating the potential for widespread disruptions or simultaneous extortion across several organisations.

The challenge is not purely technical. Cultural and behavioural dynamics also play a part. Suppliers may hesitate to disclose emerging threats or early-stage incidents due to concerns about reputational harm, commercial repercussions, or contractual penalties. At the same time, customer organisations may implicitly expect suppliers to resolve issues independently until escalation becomes unavoidable.

This dynamic discourages early transparency, even though earlier collaboration could significantly reduce the impact of incidents.

In practice, ransomware exposure in third-party relationships can manifest in several ways: service outages, attackers pivoting through trusted connections, weak recovery capabilities, or delayed incident disclosure driven by fear of contractual consequences.

Encouraging more open information sharing requires organisations to move beyond purely compliance-driven oversight to shared risk ownership. Maturity-based assessments, collaborative exercises, shared threat intelligence, and environments that encourage early disclosure all contribute to stronger relationships and greater resilience.

Criticality, certification and misplaced assurance

Tiering suppliers by criticality is a common feature of mature TPRM programmes. Certifications and third-party attestations are frequently used as indicators of security maturity within these tiers.

However, certifications are ultimately interpreted and implemented by individuals. The presence of a recognised standard can therefore create a sense of assurance that does not always reflect the real risk associated with a specific service, environment, or delivery model. Over time, this can lead to reduced scrutiny of suppliers whose formal credentials appear strong, even when operational exposure remains significant.

A graduated approach to attestation enables suppliers to provide assurance proportional to their criticality. Subsequently, high-impact suppliers must demonstrate stronger control maturity and provide more substantial supporting evidence, while lower-criticality suppliers are subject to proportionately lighter assurance requirements. This tiered approach aligns oversight with risk while avoiding unnecessary burden on smaller vendors.

Relationships, legacy, and reduced scrutiny

Long-standing supplier relationships, particularly those supported by strong personal connections at senior levels, often benefit from a degree of trust not afforded to newer providers. Over time, this trust can reduce the frequency or depth of security scrutiny.

This rarely reflects deliberate negligence. Instead, it demonstrates how human relationships influence organisational behaviour. Although governance frameworks may mandate consistent oversight, in practice, scrutiny is seldom applied uniformly across all suppliers.

Legacy contracts can further increase exposure. Many were written before today’s cyber, operational, and regulatory expectations existed and therefore lack modern security clauses, clear incident-reporting requirements, defined recovery obligations, or meaningful audit rights. These gaps can leave organisations with limited leverage during an incident.

A clear example occurred in mid-2023 when a zero-day vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer, a widely used secure file-transfer product, was exploited by the Clop ransomware group. Attackers breached servers operated by hundreds of service providers, exposing sensitive data belonging to thousands of organisations that had no direct relationship with the compromised software.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Daniel J. Boorstin.

The continued presence of third-party cyber risk does not necessarily indicate that frameworks are ineffective. Instead, it highlights how behavioural dynamics and organisational incentives shape how those frameworks operate in practice.

Many of the most significant drivers of exposure sit outside formal processes and control structures. For boards and senior leaders, it is essential to recognise that human behaviour fundamentally shapes the effectiveness of third-party risk management.

Part 2 will explore how these behavioural dynamics influence real-world resilience when critical third parties experience cyber incidents or operational disruptions.