For years, Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) lived in spreadsheets, PDFs and inboxes. Security teams chased questionnaires; procurement chased signatures; legal chased clauses. Everyone agreed vendor risk mattered, but the process was slow, manual and reactive.
Rankiteo changes that.
More and more companies are not just checking Rankiteo occasionally from the outside. They are embedding Rankiteo inside their organization, making it a formal step in the Due Diligence phase of their TPRM policy.
This article explains how that works in practice and why internal teams are standardizing on Rankiteo as their cyber-rating source of truth.
From Optional Tool to Mandatory TPRM Control
In a typical ISO 27001 aligned TPRM framework, the Due Diligence phase includes:
- Identifying the vendor and service
- Classifying data and criticality
- Assessing cybersecurity and privacy controls
- Deciding whether risk is acceptable or needs treatment
Historically, this meant lengthy custom questionnaires, ad-hoc Google searches and one-off penetration test reports.
Organizations using Rankiteo have added a simple, powerful rule to their internal policy:
“Every new third party with access to sensitive data must have a Rankiteo Cyber Score recorded as part of Due Diligence.”
In other words, Rankiteo is no longer just a nice-to-have external website. It becomes:
- a mandatory evidence item in the TPRM checklist
- a standardized, comparable metric across all vendors
- a trigger for additional controls when risk is high
Where Rankiteo Sits in the TPRM Policy
Most customers integrate Rankiteo at three key points in their TPRM lifecycle:
- Initial Screening (Pre-RFP / Pre-Contract)
Before sending a questionnaire, procurement quickly checks Rankiteo. Vendors with very poor scores or multiple breaches may be excluded early or flagged for deeper review. Time is saved by not launching full due diligence on obviously high-risk, non-critical vendors. - Formal Due Diligence (Before Contract Signature)
For selected vendors, the Rankiteo company page and incident history are captured as evidence. The Rankiteo Cyber Score is mapped to internal risk tiers (for example Green / Amber / Red).
If the score is below a defined threshold, additional actions are triggered:- extra security questionnaire sections
- targeted questions about specific historical incidents
- additional clauses in the contract (e.g. breach notification, minimum control requirements)
- Ongoing Monitoring (Post-Contract)
Rankiteo is used to continuously monitor vendors for new incidents. Significant drops in score or new breaches automatically open a risk ticket or trigger a review. The TPRM policy explicitly states that renewal decisions and board reporting will use Rankiteo trends as an input.
How Different Teams Use Rankiteo Internally
Procurement
- Uses Rankiteo as a pre-filter during vendor selection.
- Adds “Rankiteo Cyber Score” as a field in the vendor intake form.
- Uses comparison pages to justify why one supplier is preferred over another from a cyber-risk perspective.
Security / CISO Office
- Uses Rankiteo reports as evidence during ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audits to demonstrate objective, external monitoring of vendors.
Relies on Rankiteo incident timelines to contextualize questionnaires:
“You have had three breaches in the last 24 months – what permanent controls did you implement?”
Defines risk thresholds; for example:
“Vendors with a score below 650 require a remediation plan or an explicit risk acceptance.”
Legal & Compliance
- References Rankiteo in internal procedures as an external risk-rating input.
- Aligns contracts with what Rankiteo shows:
- stronger clauses for vendors with a history of breaches
- clearer notification timelines when new incidents are detected
Management & Risk Committees
- Receive high-level dashboards based on Rankiteo scores:
- how many critical vendors are in Good / Fair / Poor bands
- the trend of risk across key suppliers
- which third parties experienced new incidents this quarter
- Use this view to prioritize remediation and investment.
What Changes in the Due Diligence Workflow
Once Rankiteo is embedded into the TPRM policy, the Due Diligence process becomes:
Faster
- External cyber posture is visible in seconds.
- There is no need to wait weeks for vendors to send documents before spotting major red flags.
More objective
- Vendors are compared using the same scoring model and incident classification.
- Decisions are less political and more data-driven.
More transparent
- Rankiteo’s history and methodology are visible; risk owners can see why the score is low.
- Vendors can be invited to view their page, claim their profile and improve their score.
Easier to audit
- For every vendor, auditors can see:
- the Rankiteo score at onboarding
- the incidents recorded at that time
- how often the organization re-checked or monitored the vendor
- This directly supports ISO 27001 controls related to supplier security and continuous monitoring.
An Example Policy Statement
Many organizations end up with language similar to this inside their TPRM or Supplier Security Policy:
All third parties with access to Confidential or Personal Data must have an external cybersecurity assessment recorded in Rankiteo.
The Rankiteo Cyber Score and incident history must be reviewed as part of the Due Diligence phase, prior to contract signature.
Vendors with a Rankiteo Cyber Score below a defined threshold cannot be onboarded without a documented risk treatment plan or formal risk acceptance by a named role or committee.
Rankiteo will be used for ongoing monitoring of key suppliers; significant score drops or new incidents must trigger a review.
This kind of wording transforms Rankiteo from “a tool we sometimes check” into an official control in the governance framework.
Why Rankiteo Fits Naturally Into Modern TPRM
Rankiteo is built for exactly this use case. It tracks real incidents, not just surface-level technical hygiene. It provides company pages, history timelines and comparisons that are understandable for non-technical stakeholders. It integrates cleanly into existing TPRM flows: intake forms, risk registers, dashboards, policies and audits.
As regulations get stricter and supply-chain attacks grow more frequent, organizations can no longer treat cybersecurity ratings as a marketing gadget. They need a repeatable, auditable, external view of vendor risk.
That’s why more companies are choosing to make Rankiteo part of their internal Due Diligence process not as an optional check, but as a core, documented step of their TPRM policy.