Understanding your unique cyber-risk is a natural starting point for your organisation as you seek to shore up your defences and keep the hackers out. Technology brings progress, but can also add layers of complexity to your estate.

This has been exacerbated by the increasing adoption of cloud – cloud-based silos have formed across many organisations and can make it very difficult for you to know exactly what you have, where it is, and who has access to it.

For industries who rely upon extensive supply chains to service their operations, the challenge is undoubtedly aggravated. However, there’s risk for any organisation that counts a supply chain amongst their ecosystems.

Your supply chain security is only as good as its weakest link. That’s a fact. All the time and effort made in training your staff, buying best of breed technology, aligning your security and operations strategy, and prioritising security in your budget forecast can be quickly undermined if even just one of your suppliers has failed to do the same.  

Full transparency across every aspect of your operation is needed. Understanding your risk is the first step to quantifying, prioritising and addressing the threats that you face. And even if you are already quantifying risk across your supply chain are you doing so effectively?

In a recent Gartner report, only 38% of respondents considered completion of third-party risk assessments to quantify their supply chain cyber-risk important.

There’s a temptation for many organisations to prioritise the security protocols of their key suppliers, focusing less on the fringe members of their ecosystem. Understandable, yet the effects can be catastrophic.

With a raft of resources at their disposal, cyber-criminals frequently harness phishing and ransomware attacks; as AI makes these attacks more difficult to spot, a distracted employee – even in one of the smallest, seemingly innocuous companies that form your supply chain – can in a single moment, open your door and let them in.

According to the 2022 Cyberthreat Defense Report, over a 12-month period, ransomware attacks affected 73% of UK organisations.

The good news is that things are definitely changing and it’s time to embrace what Forrester calls The Secure Everywhere Movement — the practice of moving testing, quality and performance evaluation early in the development process, often before any code is written. The signs are that this approach is really taking hold.

‘By 2025, 60% of supply chain organisations will use cyber-security risk as a significant determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business engagements’, according to a Gartner survey of 499 supply chain leaders between October and December of 2022.

Don’t think of supply chain risk strategy as separate from business strategy. A risk to your supply chain is a risk to your business. With that approach in mind, strengthen collaboration between your members of your supply chain, procurement and enterprise risk management departments. 

The CISO is key to driving this collaboration and today increasingly has the support of the board behind them. Heidrick & Struggles global survey indicates that 80% of CISOs (PDF) can invest in the leadership and development that they need to build or enhance team capabilities.  Empowered to prioritise understanding, quantification and mitigation of cyber-risk, your cyber-security leader can be primed to secure every weak spot and compromised gate across your supply chain.

Once you’re all aligned to the same goals, the right technology – such as cyber-risk assessment, threat priority reporting and the use of AI solutions to identify anything out of the ordinary – can help you build a framework that minimises risks across your operations and has been proven to almost double effectiveness in mitigating supplier risks.

Top tip: focus on resilience features already embedded in your widely deployed enterprise applications – are you optimising what you already have?

But even with all departments, strategies and technologies aligned to repel the most robust of cyber-threats, your secure borderless estate is not an end state. Dynamic and rapidly shifting, it can change on a daily basis. Something as simple as a change in personnel at one touchpoint of your supply chain can expose you to attack.

With our Security Advisory Services and managed security services dedicated to helping businesses frame, understand and manage risk, we’ve developed a number of tried and tested tools which can help our customers continuously predict, detect and neutralise security threats.