Business is now truly interconnected, so whatever the nature of your product or service, your organisation will be, in some way, part of a supply chain – and a chain is only ever as strong as its weakest link. If one link experiences a security breach, then bad actors will not hesitate to use that to gain access to other suppliers’ infrastructure, potentially creating a domino chain, where a small, isolated breach leads to a string of serious, costly ones.
In 2021, for example, the NCSC and its US counterparts discovered that SolarWinds had been compromised, allowing international bad actors to mount further attacks on the organisations making use of the popular IT management platform, sending administrator-level commands to their systems.
Your systems and processes for optimising business resilience – i.e. cyber security, disaster recovery, and business continuity – should therefore be designed and developed with such risks in mind. While this may sound like an overwhelming prospect at first, the good news is that effective methodologies are already in place for establishing effective supply chain governance, simplifying the journey and enabling you to achieve and maintain cyber best practice across all levels of your organisation.