Closing the Vendor Trust Gap When it comes to critical risk management, the support of third parties can be both a blessing and a curse.

The benefits of outsourcing need little introduction. Offloading complex tasks can enable firms to focus their internal resources and budgets on core competencies, all while providing access to specialised skills and advanced tools that might be prohibitively expensive to bring in house.

The merits are significant. Yet for many businesses, the appeal of outsourcing can create real dependencies on external parties that present their own set of issues.

Research from CyXcel shows that organisations are now actively outsourcing business critical functions such as cyber incident response (26%), AI adoption (20%) and geopolitical risk management (21%). The same analysis highlights the motivations, with nearly one in four risk managers (24%) revealing that they feel overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of threats they're tasked with navigating, leading many to seek out external support.

A rock and a hard place come to mind. Organisations feel they need external support to manage key risks, but don't necessarily know whether the support they are receiving is effective.

This is not helped by vendors themselves. Trust in services is often based on traditional due diligence methods such as tick-box questionnaires, reviews, or paper-based certifications, yet these only offer an in-moment snapshot of resilience, which is no longer fit for purpose in today's dynamic risk landscape.

Security postures are changing all the time with staff turnover, M&A activity, technology updates and financial pressures. So too is the threat landscape of cybercrime, geopolitics and evolving technologies. How can modern companies reliably assess the performance of partners tasked with delivering real-time resilience, when their visibility is limited to isolated, one-time data points?

Complexity, dependency and doubt

It is this gap in understanding and insight that is leading to a mistrust of vendors. Simply put, many companies feel caught between dependence on outside providers and doubts about those same providers' capabilities.

CyXcel's research lays bare this conundrum. It shows that nearly three in ten (27%) UK risk managers feel they don't trust that third party vendors are able to confidently manage their most critical threats. At the same time, CyXcel's analysis highlights that more than a quarter (28%) of UK respondents do not fully understand the risks they're responsible for managing, making it almost impossible to assess whether vendors are fit for purpose.

Clearly, many companies are handing over their critical risk management keys without the confidence that partners are delivering relevant and/or adequate protection. Businesses are burdened by complexity, only to then leave the handling of the organisational lifeboat to vendors they barely trust.

At a time in which threats are continuously intensifying, this cannot continue. Companies need to consider if they are outsourcing strategically, or simply doing so because they feel they should, without a true understanding of the reasoning.

Investing in internal clarity can build confidence in vendor partnerships

What's needed now is a shift toward integrated intelligence, not just compliance checklists. Static, once-a-year supplier assessments cannot keep pace with risks that evolve hourly. The threat landscape has simply become too fluid, new vulnerabilities, regulatory changes and geopolitical tensions can emerge overnight, rendering traditional risk reports obsolete by the time they are circulated. Therefore, when companies assume yesterday's assurance equals today's safety, blind spots emerge.

Continuous validation is 'best in class', with real-time monitoring of controls, dynamic threat intelligence, ongoing stress tests and data-driven insights. This becomes the only credible approach in an environment where speed and adaptability are as important as accuracy. In other words, it's no longer about whether a vendor was compliant last quarter, but whether they can withstand the disruption that could hit tomorrow morning and whether your organisation can detect and respond before that disruption cascades through the supply chain.

Achieving this requires internal visibility. That means mapping critical dependencies across business units and identifying which suppliers have access to data, systems and networks. From here, firms can then establish clear lines of risk ownership and align procurement with security, legal and resilience functions to ensure that accountability is shared, not siloed.

Risk ownership insight can and should be attained through a tiered supplier model that prioritises continuous oversight of the company's most critical vendors, supported by automated tools for monitoring cyber exposure, financial stability and geopolitical risk signals. Supplementing this with predictive analytics and scenario-based simulations allows teams to anticipate rather than simply absorb shocks.

This isn't a case of implementing a one-time solution. Effective risk management assessment also requires ongoing testing, monitoring and management. An effective resilience strategy will also incorporate scenario planning, for example, to repeatedly evaluate whether a partner can deliver what they promise not only in normal conditions, but also under pressures or stresses.

Investing in this internal clarity can provide businesses with the foundations to develop vital external partnerships with confidence. It can enable firms to choose vendors not out of necessity, or simply based on cost of perceived capabilities, but based on proven resilience, relevance and trustworthiness.

The more you understand the risks, the better equipped you'll be to evaluate exactly who should be helping you to manage and mitigate them.