An organization is only as secure as its weakest link, and that link can often lie outside of the company’s walls: third-party risk. Even the most robust internal security practices and processes can’t effectively protect against weak spots in an enterprise’s supply chain. In fact, the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that 30% of all breaches analyzed were linked to third-party involvement, twice as much as the year prior.
Third-party vendors, contractors, and partners form a complex web of connections that are essential for organizations. However, they have opened the floodgates to new, alarming security risks. When a third-party breach happens, the challenge isn’t necessarily the exploit itself, but rather the inability to quickly and effectively answer fundamental questions such as: Which partners have access to our systems, and what data do they have access to? Who owns and monitors these access paths?
The reality is that most organizations lack full visibility into how third parties access and manage identities across their full ecosystems. The good news? Modern identity approaches can help reduce supply chain exposure and risk without introducing unnecessary friction for users. Let’s explore.
Understanding third-party threats
As organizations expand their digital footprints, third parties are granted increasing levels of access to internal systems and sensitive data. Some common third-party threats include:
● Unverified onboarding: Third-party users are granted access with little to no identity verification or validation.
● Excessive access: Granting users more privileges than necessary and undermining the principle of least privilege.
● Credential sharing: Credentials are shared within partner organizations, making it difficult to attribute actions to a specific individual.
● Orphaned accounts: Accounts that remain active after a partnership ends or a user becomes inactive - forgotten but still exploitable.
Identity is the new perimeter for today’s enterprises, and threat actors know this. Without clear visibility into third-party activity, organizations not only broaden the attack surface, but they also open themselves up to compliance and regulatory risk. This lack of visibility makes it difficult to detect unauthorized access, enforce security policies, and demonstrate adherence to data protection requirements.
Challenges in securing the supply chain
Implementing strong access controls for third-party organizations can prove difficult. Not only is sheer volume a major hurdle, but each third-party operates differently. For example, each has its own IT infrastructure, security processes, and maturity levels. One partner may have a sophisticated identity system in place while another simply uses an unsecured spreadsheet. This can then lead to fragmented identity data for each organization.
Because of this, it’s often unclear who has access to what, what systems each third party can reach, and how behavior is being monitored across the enterprise. These challenges often result in organizations falling back on manual identity processes instead of leaning into the complexity and solving for it. Enterprises are not only left with a huge gap in their visibility, but they also create unnecessary friction for their customers through clunky or outdated digital identity processes.
Building resilience to reduce risk
Third parties are not something that organizations can simply cut out of their daily operations to limit risk exposure. In order to reduce risk when it comes to these third parties, it’s critical to build resilience into your identity strategies. The goal is to enable secure access, not just block it.
Taking an identity-first approach can offer a scalable and effective way to manage third-party access amid the vast supply chain ecosystem. Here are a few best practices to help do this:
● Verification at onboarding: Before granting user access, use identity proofing techniques to ensure that every external user is who they claim to be.
● Implementing zero trust: Continuously validating access requests and not automatically assuming trust based on data like network location or partner reputation.
● Applying phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA): Requiring strong MFA for all third-party access can help protect against credential-based attacks.
● Automating offboarding and other changes: When a user leaves their company, their role changes, or a contract ends, old accounts can create major security risk. Automatically revoking access when this happens is crucial.
These techniques not only help reduce risk but also create a seamless experience that customers expect in today’s digital age.
In a world where your organization’s next data breach may come from a third-party, identity is the first, and best, line of defense. By managing third-party access through modern identity controls, organizations can ensure secure processes behind the scenes while maintaining the frictionless experiences customers expect.
