Solutions
A solution is a specific product or service provided by an entity: a SaaS application, a managed service, a hosting platform, a support contract. Entities tell you who you depend on; solutions tell you what for — and that is the level at which dependency, criticality and continuity planning actually work. One vendor providing three services is three different exposures, not one.
Where to find it
Section titled “Where to find it”Third parties → Solutions in the sidebar, or the Solutions tab on an entity’s page. The list shows Reference ID, Name, Description, Provider entity, Criticality and Labels, and filters by provider entity, criticality and label.
What a solution holds
Section titled “What a solution holds”| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name and Description | What the service is |
| Reference ID | Your own identifier — a contract number, a CMDB id |
| Provider entity | The entity supplying it. Required |
| Recipient entity | Who receives it, when it is not your main organisation |
| Criticality | How much the business depends on this service |
| Owner | The actor accountable for the relationship on your side |
| Related assets | The assets that depend on, or are exposed by, this solution |
| Reference link | The service page, the console, the internal runbook |
| Is active | Retire a solution without deleting its history |
| Labels | Free-form tags for grouping and filtering |
Recipient entity is what makes intra-group modelling work: a shared-services subsidiary providing a platform to three sister companies is three solutions with three recipients, not one blurred record.
Criticality
Section titled “Criticality”Criticality is a numeric rating of how much the operation depends on the solution. It drives the order in which vendors get assessed, and the order in which they get chased when an assessment stalls. It is also a filter on the list, which turns “review our critical suppliers this quarter” into one click rather than a spreadsheet.
Rate the service, not the vendor. A large supplier providing something peripheral is a low-criticality solution, and a small supplier holding your production database is not.
Linking assets
Section titled “Linking assets”Related assets is the field that makes a solution more than a procurement record. Connecting a solution to the assets it supports means a vendor question can be answered from either end: what breaks if this provider goes down? and who is behind this asset? It is also what lets third-party findings surface in the same impact analysis as internal ones.
Where solutions turn up
Section titled “Where solutions turn up”- On an entity assessment, where the assessment names the solutions in scope — so the questionnaire’s answers apply to a defined service rather than to the vendor in the abstract.
- On a contract, which covers one or more solutions with dates and commercial terms.
- On the third-party dashboard, where each card lists the solutions its assessment covers.
The natural order is: register the entity, register its solutions, then assess. An assessment that names no solution is hard to act on, because nobody can say which service the answers describe.