Technology leaders in corporate and commercial real estate have a strong mandate to extend their cyber security verification to their vendors. These mandates come from multiple sources:

• Public companies must provide representations to the SEC and shareholders that they are operating to best practices, like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that call for secure vendor management.
• Cyber insurance requires that companies demonstrate best practice to secure insurance and will only pay damages if the company took all responsible steps to prevent a breach.
• Real estate providers are in the supply chain of public companies who themselves have to maintain and demonstrate a comprehensive cybersecurity approach including their suppliers

Operational technology (OT) leaders can no longer pass along vendors’ representations about cybersecurity fitness, but they must verify it themselves.

• OT leaders must conduct thorough assessments of each vendor’s security practices, going beyond surface-level claims.
• Regular checks and audits of vendor security postures are necessary, not just one-time verifications.
• Leaders must evaluate the potential impact of a vendor’s security breach on their own systems and data.
• Leaders must develop and test incident response plans that include scenarios involving vendor-related security incidents.

A vendor makes this task clean and clear by maintaining certified cybersecurity practices that they can share with their customers. 

These include approaches that demonstrate secure practices, on a continuous basis, in each element of the business including product development:

• SOC 2 Type 2 certification by auditors
• ISO 27001
• Penetration Testing

Most legacy OT cannot meet these certification standards. However, OT leaders can secure the underlying vendors who cannot certify their cybersecurity practices themselves by shielding or cloaking the vendor systems with a secure access service edge. 

This edge needs to identify and then isolate such products to protect them from threats coming over the internet, which is the vast majority of the vulnerability surface.

Neeve Secure Edge is a comprehensive secure access service edge (SASE) solution that integrates OT cybersecurity, secure remote and cloud access, and edge computing capabilities, enabling innovative data usage and seamless adoption of cloud applications.

Secure Edge greatly assists our customers with Secure Vendor Management including:

1. Comprehensive protection for both modern and legacy systems
2. Simplified vendor management through our rigorous SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and Penetration Test certifications including both hardware and software end-to-end
3. Alignment with NIST standards for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
4. Real-time threat detection and response capabilities

Our team has been able to quickly provide all the answers and evidence for our customers and partners to complete their audit and certification of our platform.