Black Kite Bridge enables risk collaboration across vendor ecosystem

Black Kite today introduced Black Kite Bridge, a solution that enables customer and vendor collaboration for real-time risk mitigation and remediation throughout the supply chain. This innovative, streamlined approach helps organizations prevent business disruptions and enhance resiliency.

Third-party breaches are on the rise, with a 29% increase last year according to Black Kite data. These breaches lead to cascading effects in extended networks, and because of this, rapid identification of impacted organizations and their supply chains is crucial. Moreover, this requires streamlined communication with suppliers, vendors, and partners.

In practice most companies still use slow, unreliable manual processes, such as email and questionnaires, to assess exposure. Further, technology stacks are fragmented, with the vulnerability intelligence often living in a separate tool than communications. The result is that responses to partner queries of incident exposures are often unreliable, with response rates of well below 50%. In the time it takes to gather intel and coordinate an outreach to their vendors, organizations are left exposed to potential risk.

Black Kite strengthens third-party response during high-profile security incidents by providing customers with near-real-time insights into impacted companies with its FocusTags feature, which automatically flags vendors who have experienced a data breach, ransomware attack or other significant cyberattack. Now, the Black Kite Bridge empowers customers to share that intelligence directly with their vendors during an incident, communicate directly in the platform, take actions to remediate, and ultimately close out the risk.

Black Kite Bridge also addresses a common vendor pain point of being overwhelmed with individual requests they can’t respond to promptly. Now they can communicate and make their responses visible to the entire Black Kite ecosystem while also benefiting from real-time ratings updates from remediated vulnerabilities. This streamlines and expedites responses so vendors can achieve scale in resolving inquiries.

“Early customers using Black Kite Bridge experienced a significant improvement in vendor participation, with response rates rising as high as 90%, solving a major pain point when it comes to third-party risk management,” said Chuck Schauber, chief product officer at Black Kite. “When customers can easily collaborate with vendors and suppliers, it creates a system of cascading benefits that improves security and reduces risk throughout the cyber ecosystem.” 

Additional Black Kite Bridge benefits include:

• Automation: Eliminate the need to send endless emails, and let the automation of the Black Kite Bridge system do the work of informing, sharing, and tracking. 
• Time savings: Reduce days of outreach to minutes. Instant reporting on KPIs. 
• Cost savings: Enable one analyst to do the work of three, enabling even resource-strapped teams to start managing risks and preempt business disruptions.
• Increased participation: Improve vendor response rate by over 200%.
• Tool consolidation: Intelligence, vendor communications, and reporting all in a single platform.

“The Bridge is the most valuable aspect of the platform for us,” said a manager of vendor security and risk. “Black Kite already provides great data and insights, but having the ability to effectively take action and collaborate with vendors throughout our supply chain increases the value of a tool like this tremendously because we can actually close out the risk.”

Visit the website to learn more about Black Kite Bridge.