Relying on the kindness of strangers is not an ideal strategy for CISOs and CIOs. And yet that is the precise position where most find themselves today while trying to battle cybersecurity issues across their supply chain. While these supply chains have plenty of their own challenges, such as global disruptions of distribution, our recent research shows that it’s the cybersecurity problems that will long survive for the long term.
It’s not as though enterprises rely on their partners any more today than they did ten years ago. Their needs have not changed and are unlikely to change, except those rare instances where an enterprise will choose to manufacture their own supplies rather than rely on partners. Consider, for example, Costco creating its own gigantic chicken farm. Other than outlier examples like this, partner reliance is relatively stable.
What is changing with the supply chain is how much system access is being granted to these partners. They are getting access they didn’t always get and are getting far deeper access as well. As technology has advanced to allow such access, enterprises have accepted.
Given the wide range of partners–suppliers, distributors, contractors, outsourced sales, cloud platforms, geographical specialists, and sometimes your own largest customers–the cybersecurity complexities are growing by orders of magnitude. In addition, the more integrations that enterprises accept, the higher the level that their risk is. To be more precise, the risk doesn’t necessarily grow with the number of partners as much as the risk grows with the number of partners whose cybersecurity environments are less secure than the enterprise’s own environment.
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