Vendor Access Review

List where vendors can touch money, data, content, or identity.

Start with practical categories: shared inboxes, payment systems, analytics, cloud storage, CMS accounts, ad platforms, code repositories, social channels, and automation tools. The review becomes manageable when you look at concrete systems instead of “all vendor access.”

Every external access path should have an internal owner.

Somebody on the internal team should know why the access exists, what role it supports, and when it should end. That owner does not have to manage daily work, but they should be able to approve or remove access.

Check whether access is role-based or just historical.

Many access grants stay in place only because they were useful once. The goal of a review is not suspicion; it is to reduce old permissions, shared credentials, and unnecessary admin privileges.

• Does this vendor still need access today?
• Is the permission level still proportional?
• Is the access tied to a personal email instead of a managed account?
• Would the team notice quickly if this access was abused or misused?

Run smaller reviews on a schedule instead of rare giant audits.

A quarterly pass across high-value systems is often enough for a small operation. The review works best when it is light, repeatable, and tied to role changes, vendor changes, and offboarding events.