Glossary
Vendor Access
Vendor access describes any grant given to a third party outside the organization's own workforce — a contractor, a support partner, a software vendor's engineer — usually for a specific, time-bounded purpose rather than open-ended employment. Because the party holding it isn't subject to the organization's own onboarding, training, or termination processes, vendor access needs its own explicit oversight rather than inheriting the assumptions built for employee accounts.
The recurring failure mode is access that outlives the engagement: a vendor's project concludes, but the account or credential they were given is never explicitly revoked because no internal offboarding process was ever triggered for it. Tying vendor access to an explicit end date, checked automatically rather than remembered manually, closes that gap.