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Our experience with Risk Ledger has been overwhelmingly positive…I've found Risk Ledger to be an invaluable platform in streamlining our subscribers' approach to third-party risk management and helping us build and maintain customer trust.
Bogdan M. Gagea, Senior Security Manager, Security Assurance & Insights, Zendesk Ireland
Risk Ledger, the cutting-edge third-party risk management platform, empowers security and procurement teams to Defend-as-One by visualising and managing their entire supply chain in real-time. Our collaborative approach enhances supply chain security, reduces compliance burdens, and strengthens organisations’ defences because every link matters in cyber security.
Risk Ledger is a platform for both clients and suppliers, where organisations can review the security controls of their suppliers while suppliers maintain one up-to-date security profile that they can share with both existing and prospective clients, on and off the platform. It is free for suppliers to use and helps them avoid having to complete hundreds of different questionnaires. A completed Risk Ledger supplier profile can be shared again and again with clients, customers, investors and partners, showcasing their commitment to security.
According to Bogdan M. Gagea, Senior Security Manager, Security Assurance & Insights, at Zendesk Ireland, the experience using Risk Ledger has been:
...overwhelmingly positive. As the Senior Security Manager for Zendesk's Security Assurance & Insights team, responsible for establishing trust with over 200,000 customers, I've found Risk Ledger to be an invaluable platform in streamlining our subscribers' approach to third-party risk management and helping us build and maintain customer trust.
When asked about the product features that he most valued in Risk Ledger, Bogdan explained:
“The standout features for us are the ease of sharing our security profile with both existing Zendesk customers and prospects. The UI/UX is exceptionally user-friendly, and the Action Centre provides convenient access to connection and remediation requests. We haven't encountered any significant shortcomings to date; in fact the platform has only gotten better over time.”
In the past, suppliers had to spend hours upon hours filling in the different security questionnaires their clients asked them to complete. But there’s bound to be significant overlaps between the control questions asked from one client to the next, which means effectively Zendesk were constantly and unnecessarily repeating workloads.
Risk Ledger was designed to standardise this process for suppliers, cutting out all the time wasted on responding to countless security questionnaires or scrolling through email chains and complicated spreadsheets.
With Risk Ledger, the idea is for suppliers to just complete one comprehensive supplier assessment, mapped against all leading international standards such as ISO27001 or NIST, at an organisational level once, and then maintain the same profile as their businesses grow.
This also significantly speeds up sales and procurement processes as well as help build trust with customers, as Bogdan pointed out:
“We've observed that a significant number of clients accept our Risk Ledger profile without requiring additional assessments. This has been instrumental in expediting the sales process for deals with large customers. Your assessment sections cover a wide range of domains and are sufficiently comprehensive to build and maintain customer trust.”
He further drew attention to the broader efficiency gains that Risk Ledger helped Zendesk achieve:
“Risk Ledger has significantly improved the efficiency of our customer assessment processes. It has enabled us to standardise our approach across various customer requirements and substantially reduced the time spent on redundant questionnaires.”
To support suppliers, Risk Ledger also provides an extensive supporting Knowledge Base that helps suppliers understand which controls they should have in place and how to implement them. In the words of Bogdan:
“The Supplier Q&As and help sections have proven to be extremely useful, particularly when onboarding new team members or addressing unique customer inquiries. They serve as an excellent reference point for common questions and best practices in the industry.”
One of the key aspects that makes Risk Ledger truly unique among supply chain risk management tools is that organisations can use Risk Ledger in the capacity of both, an organisation wishing to review the security of its suppliers as well as a supplier to showcase its own security profile to its clients. This creates a comprehensive and growing map of supply chain relationships and the visualisation of risks and dependencies far beyond immediate third parties, into 4th, 5th and nth parties. Over time, these network effects lead to organic, accurate representation of the global supply chain.
What this means for suppliers like Zendesk is that potentially considering of also starting to use Risk Ledger to assess the security of their own suppliers, they even gain a new value proposition for prospective customers, namely that by working with Zendesk, the customer would gain an unprecedented view into their extended supply chain ecosystem and risks, significantly boosting their overall supply chain security and potentially compliance efforts.
With respect to Zendesk’s view on potentially also utilising Risk Ledger in the capacity of a client, Bogdan explained that:
“While we currently primarily use Risk Ledger as a supplier, we are actively exploring the potential of leveraging it to assess our own suppliers. This dual-use approach could provide a more holistic view of our security ecosystem and further streamline our risk management processes.”
In terms of new features specifically for suppliers that Zendesk would like to see Risk Ledger develop, “a dashboard with enhanced analytics capabilities would be a welcome addition”, Bogdan explained, "allowing us to gain better visibility and metrics regarding our profile and its performance.”
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