Supply Chain Assessment - reduce the potential for compromise
Businesses often form multiple partnerships with their suppliers, which usually involves linking into systems and sharing information to provide an efficient service or products to customers. Supply Chain Assessment is the auditing of your supply chain to identify areas of potential threat, either current or future, and to then provide the steps to eradicate, as far as possible these weaknesses in processes and systems.
One of the most common third-party weak links in the security chain are suppliers. Statistics stand as indisputable proof for the breaches and data loss incidents occurred through poor controls associated with the supply chain.
An example is the MOD who is committed to securing its Supply Chain:
‘The MOD is committed to ensuring it and its supply chain are appropriately protected and has been working jointly with Industry and other Government departments in the Defence Cyber Protection Partnership (DCPP) to develop a proportionate means of achieving this. As a first step, the MOD will be implementing the Government’s Cyber Essentials Scheme through a compliance question in its supplier selection Pre-Qualification Questionnaire.’
Cyber Essentials Certification
This now starting to filter through to commercial business with some major organisations seeing the need to complete the Cyber Essentials Certification.
Cyber Essentials is very much a starting point as Cyber experts also conduct Supply Chain Assessments by following the steps below:
• Comprehensive review of all suppliers from an end-to-end standpoint
• Categorisation into tiers dependent on their risk exposure and hazard potential they bring to the parent company
• Defining a level of control and testing for each supplier category;
• Outlining the most efficient risk strategies your company needs in order to ensure that all supply chains meet the Cyber Essentials Standards cyber-security requirements.
Take action to protect your business from potential security breaches arising from your supply chain by contacting our Cyber Essentials team now. Call Paul Cochrane on 01704 542 420 now.
