IDC Australia senior market analyst, Vern Hue, warns that when enterprises provide third party access, they are placing faith in the partner or customer to have the right security levels in place.

"This, in essence, makes the third party the potential chink in the company's information security armour because any attacks on the other party's infrastructure may lead to the compromise of the enterprise as the malicious actors may find an access to this network via a backdoor," he says.

Symantec Asia Pacific director of specialist solutions, Sean Kopelke, says that as more organisations leverage the Cloud and virtualization, they are potentially housing their data in an environment that plays host to a competitor's. "It's therefore important you do your due diligence and understand whether your provider has the right systems in place to ensure the integrity of your most sensitive information," he says.

The threats from third party access can come from the loss of confidence of a breach if the partner, or third party, gets compromised, says IDC's Hue. "The company's reputation is also under scrutiny and this would certainly cost a lot of embarrassment, at the very least," he says. "If the malicious actor finds a way into the network and breaches it, there may be financial losses incurred and the loss of trust that can ultimately lead to the abandonment by customers as no one would want to deal with an organisation which, in their view, takes security lightly."