Certified: The ISACA AAIA Audio Course

In this episode, we tackle a reality that shows up in almost every modern A I project: at some point, your organization depends on vendors, partners, or external services, and that is exactly where your direct visibility starts to fade. When you are brand new to cybersecurity, it can feel comforting to believe that if you lock down your own systems, you are safe. In practice, your security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain of people and systems you rely on. With A I, supply chain reliance can be even deeper, because you may use third-party models, third-party training data, hosted model services, annotation services, evaluation tools, or entire platforms that do not run inside your own environment. The question is not whether vendors are good or bad, but whether your organization has controls that manage risk in the parts you cannot directly observe. You want to learn how to evaluate vendor security and supply chain controls in a way that is fair, practical, and focused on evidence, especially when the vendor is the one doing the work behind a curtain.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

To evaluate an A I vendor relationship, start by understanding what you are actually buying, because different vendor roles create different risks. Some vendors provide a model as a service, meaning you send inputs and receive outputs, but the model runs in their infrastructure. Other vendors provide model artifacts, meaning you receive a model file or package and run it yourself. Some vendors provide data, such as training sets, labeled examples, or reference corpora. Others provide tools that connect to your data, such as retrieval systems, A I assistants, or workflow automation. These differences matter because they define where your data goes, who can access it, and who controls the security boundaries. If a vendor hosts the model, they control operational security, logging, and physical access to systems. If you host the model, you control those things, but you still inherit risk from the vendor’s model quality and development practices. A good evaluation begins with a clear map of responsibilities, because you cannot manage risk if you do not know who is responsible for which controls.

A simple beginner-friendly way to frame vendor risk is to ask three questions: what do we share, what do they control, and what could go wrong. What you share might include prompts, user messages, internal documents, sensitive data used for retrieval, or usage telemetry. What they control might include the model behavior, safety filters, infrastructure security, and the ability to update the service without your approval. What could go wrong includes data exposure, downtime, unexpected model behavior changes, and even subtle things like the vendor using your data in ways you did not intend. The key is that A I systems often involve data that is more revealing than people expect, because a prompt can contain confidential context, customer details, or internal decision logic. Evaluating where your visibility ends means identifying which parts of the system you cannot inspect directly, such as the vendor’s internal logging, their employee access policies, and their model training pipeline. Once you see the hidden areas, you can decide what evidence and contractual controls you need to reduce uncertainty.

One of the most important vendor evaluation topics in A I is data handling, because data is often the most valuable and the most sensitive asset involved. You want to know whether the vendor stores your prompts and outputs, how long they retain them, and whether those records are used to improve the service. You also want to know whether your data is used for training, fine-tuning, or analytics, and whether you can opt out. In many A I services, data can be used in ways that are not obvious to casual users, so you evaluate the vendor’s data policy as a security control, not as a marketing statement. Another key point is segregation, meaning whether your data is isolated from other customers and protected against cross-tenant exposure. If the vendor cannot clearly explain how they prevent one customer’s data from being accessed by another, that is a red flag. A strong evaluation looks for clear commitments, technical safeguards, and verifiable practices, not vague reassurances.

Supply chain controls also include access control and insider risk at the vendor, because vendor employees and contractors can have powerful access to systems that process your data. If the vendor can see your prompts, can see your retrieved documents, or can access your integration credentials, then their internal access controls matter as much as your own. Evaluating this means asking how vendor staff access is granted, whether it is limited by role, whether privileged actions require approval, and whether access is logged and reviewed. You also want to know whether the vendor uses multi-factor authentication for internal administration and whether they enforce strong security practices for their workforce. For beginner learners, it helps to remember that many major breaches happen not because an outsider hacks a firewall, but because credentials are stolen, permissions are too broad, or monitoring is weak. When your visibility ends at the vendor boundary, your evaluation should check whether the vendor’s practices reduce the chance of those common failure patterns.

Another unique A I vendor issue is model change control, because a hosted model can change without you installing anything. In normal software, you often control when updates occur, at least to some degree, and you can test them before production use. With a vendor-hosted model, the vendor might deploy a new version, adjust safety settings, change rate limits, or change system behavior to improve performance, and those changes can affect your outputs immediately. That can create security and operational risk if your organization relies on consistent behavior, such as for triage, decision support, or automated workflows. Evaluating vendor control here means asking how you are notified of changes, whether you can pin versions, whether you can test changes in advance, and whether there is a rollback option when something breaks. It also means checking whether the vendor provides visibility into model behavior changes, like release notes that explain what was altered. A vendor relationship with no change visibility is a supply chain risk because the system can shift under your feet without warning.

Vendors can also introduce supply chain risk through their own dependencies, which is often overlooked by beginners. A vendor might rely on other cloud providers, other data sources, open-source libraries, or third-party annotation services. If any of those dependencies are compromised, your service can be impacted, even if the vendor is otherwise careful. Evaluating this is challenging because you cannot inspect all of the vendor’s internals, but you can ask about their third-party risk management process. You want to know whether they assess their own vendors, whether they monitor for incidents in their supply chain, and how they communicate impact to customers. For A I, you also want to know whether their training data sources are vetted and whether they can trace where data came from. Provenance matters because untrusted data sources increase risks like poisoning, bias, and hidden licensing or privacy issues. A program that cannot explain data provenance is operating with blind spots that can become security and compliance problems.

Contracts and service agreements become part of the security control set when your visibility ends, because they define what you can require and what happens when things go wrong. Even for beginners, it helps to see a contract as a way of turning security expectations into obligations that can be verified. Useful contract concepts include data use restrictions, retention limits, breach notification timelines, audit rights, and requirements for security practices like encryption and access control. You also want clarity about incident handling: if the vendor detects suspicious activity, will they tell you, and how quickly. Another key concept is responsibility for regulatory or customer commitments, because your organization might promise customers certain protections that the vendor must support. Evaluating supply chain controls includes checking whether the contract matches the real risk, not just whether it includes generic language. If your data is highly sensitive and the vendor refuses to commit to specific safeguards, that mismatch is a risk indicator.

Monitoring and transparency are the operational side of vendor risk, and they matter because you cannot defend what you cannot see. For hosted A I services, you ideally want logs or telemetry that show usage patterns, access events, error rates, and unusual spikes that could indicate abuse. You also want the ability to detect anomalies, such as a sudden increase in requests that might signal model extraction attempts or compromised keys. If the vendor provides no monitoring data, your organization may have to rely on indirect signals, which can delay detection. Evaluating transparency also includes asking whether the vendor provides security reports, third-party assessments, or structured evidence that their controls exist and are operating. The key is that security is not just the presence of controls; it is the ability to demonstrate them. Where your visibility ends, transparency tools act as windows, and the more opaque the vendor is, the more risk you are carrying.

A practical way to judge whether an organization has real supply chain controls is to look at how they handle onboarding and ongoing review. Onboarding should include a risk assessment based on what the vendor touches, what data flows into the service, and what business processes depend on it. Ongoing review should include periodic reassessment, especially when the vendor changes services, adds features, or experiences incidents. A weak program treats vendor review as a one-time checkbox during procurement. A strong program treats it as lifecycle management, where controls are monitored and expectations are updated as the relationship evolves. For A I, this is especially important because features can expand quickly, such as a new connector that suddenly gives the model access to sensitive data, or a new tool integration that increases impact. Evaluating this means checking whether the organization can show that vendor controls are revisited over time and that changes trigger new risk decisions.

As you close this lesson, the main point to keep is that vendor and supply chain evaluation is about managing uncertainty in the places you cannot directly inspect. In A I systems, that uncertainty often involves data handling, model behavior changes, employee access at the vendor, and the vendor’s own dependencies. A strong program reduces uncertainty with clear responsibility mapping, data protection commitments, transparency mechanisms, and contracts that turn expectations into enforceable requirements. It also supports ongoing monitoring and review so that the organization does not drift into risk as the vendor’s service evolves. When your visibility ends, you do not give up; you change strategy by demanding evidence, designing for least privilege in data sharing and integrations, and ensuring you have a plan for detection and response even when the service is outside your walls. That mindset is what makes supply chain controls real, and it is a core skill for evaluating A I security in modern organizations.