4-Stage Vendor Risk Management Framework (2024 Edition) | UpGuard

### Executive summary: This article presents a four-stage Vendor Risk Management (VRM) framework—covering secure vendor onboarding and due diligence, initial and ongoing risk assessments (including attack surface management), efficient vendor collaboration, and secure offboarding—and describes how UpGuard’s platform (security ratings, questionnaires, continuous monitoring, ASM, and integrations) can be used to implement and automate the framework to reduce third- and fourth-party breach risk.