The ever-growing list of compliance and regulations that you have to meet makes supply chain management all the more tricky.
The infamous SolarWinds attack, along with many similar breaches in recent months, highlights the supply chain security risks faced by high-profile organizations.
If you’re losing sleep worrying that your own business’s supply chain may fall prey to one of these attacks, you have a good reason: While supply chain security risks are becoming increasingly more intense, the tools and strategies available to manage them have mostly fallen short.
At the same time, figuring out which risks exist in your supply chain, let alone determining the best means of addressing them, can be an extremely messy business. It requires a huge amount of manual effort. A shocking number of companies fail to perform this process on an ongoing basis — which is, of course, a risk in itself because a supply chain cybersecurity risk that exists at one moment may not be there at the next.
And that’s not all! It gets worse: The ever-growing list of compliance and regulations that you have to meet makes supply chain management all the more tricky. More than 80% of these regulations include requirements about managing supply chain risks — yet the rules tend to be somewhat ambiguous, and even the toughest businesses are struggling to figure out how to translate them into action for their unique supply chains.
But now, the good news: Findings is here to save you from the supply chain security woes you are struggling with. To do that, we’re building a platform that provides both enterprises and vendors with an automated, centralized solution for supply chain security.
Supply chain security challenges
Wonder why you’re hearing so much recently about supply chain security breaches? Here are 6 alarming reasons why this topic has become so critical for modern organizations:
- Compliance and regulations
First and foremost are growing compliance challenges associated with supply chain security. For vendors and enterprises alike, regulations like the CMMC for U.S. federal government suppliers, the various cybersecurity regulations imposed by NIST and PSD2 and DFS regulations for the banking industry mean that managing supply chain security is no longer something that companies should do. It’s something that many are either legally required to do, or that they must do if they have any hope of business success.
Take CMMC, for example: If a business wants to operate as a supplier to the DoD (and the entire U.S. government pretty soon), it needs to be able to demonstrate that it is managing its own cybersecurity risks and meets strict standards and certification. Failure to do so means missing out on a slice of the more than $650 billion that the federal government awards in vendor contracts every year.Â
- Growing stakes of cybersecurity risks
Beyond compliance mandates, the fallout from a cybersecurity breach has become greater than ever before. Even if a breach originates from within a supply chain rather than a company’s own resources, the financial damage and impact on the business’s reputation can be severe. Customers usually don’t care how their data was stolen, for example, as much as they care about the fact that it was stolen due to their relationship with a particular brand.
- The need for continuous supply chain cybersecurity
In the past, it may have sufficed to perform one-off or periodic assessments of supply chain security risks. But in today’s fast-moving, dynamic business environment, you need continuous risk identification and remediation. Earlier this year, Security Magazine reported that 51% of organizations experienced a data breach caused by a third party. That percentage is high enough to worry how your business would recover from that.
Suppliers and partner organizations change constantly. So can the tools and resources that suppliers use to deliver their own services. If you only assess supply chain risks periodically, then, you may well overlook risks that don’t happen to be active at the time you check, but that may nonetheless turn into serious issues for your business.
4. Lack of automation
Supply chain management has traditionally been quite difficult to automate. After all, suppliers and vendors don’t typically go out of their way to make it easy for external organizations to assess the security of their internal operations.
As a result, supply chain security has been a process driven by audits, personal relationships and manual investigations — all of which translate to slow, inefficient work.
5. Different vendors require different checks
Supply chain security would be simple if every vendor and supplier in your chain required the same types and level of check. But they don’t. Each organization is unique, and you need to evaluate it separately.
On top of this, initial checks may differ from the checks you perform on an ongoing basis, even for the same organization.
Both realities mean you have to take a highly granular approach to supply chain management — something that has not usually been easy to automate.
6. Reacting to vulnerabilities
Finally, while ‘simply’ finding supply chain security risks is quite challenging, figuring out what to do once you discover one is even more difficult. Vendors and enterprises often struggle to assess the severity level of each vulnerability. They may also be unsure how to remediate it in a way that poses the least disruption to their own operations but still effectively eliminates the risk.
For example, simply cutting off an important supplier may not always be the right response when you discover a minor supply chain security vulnerability. Doing so would be disruptive to your business. There may be a more efficient way of handling the risk that keeps you secure while allowing you to keep using the supplier.
                    Â
Â
The Findings approach to supply chain cybersecurity
At Findings, we lived these challenges firsthand by helping manage supply chain requirements in a world where doing so was a manual, tedious affair.
That’s why we’ve built a platform that automates supply chain cybersecurity management with the following benefits for both vendors and enterprises:
- Centralized management of supply chain security rules and risk criteria.
- Alignment with a variety of compliance standards or other unique supply chain business requirements.
- The ability to profile vendors and suppliers to discover their risks based on actual exposure levels and continuously collaborate and manage them.
- Continuously monitor and detect potential risk and automatically prioritize tasks – in the context of your own business risk.
- Maintain communication channels so you can manage supply chain risk management communications from a central tool.
Because Findings takes an automated approach to supply chain security management, it’s easy to perform risk assessment and response on a continuous basis and AT SCALE.Â
Say goodbye to manual, one-off audits, and enjoy the confidence that new risks will be identified as they emerge.
In all of these ways, Findings allows businesses to address supply chain cybersecurity risks in a much more comprehensive fashion using many fewer resources. Companies that must meet compliance requirements like CMMC can easily validate themselves, leading to more business opportunities and a lower risk of security incidents that could wreak havoc on a brand.
For years, supply chain cybersecurity has been a process that was very hard to love. It was tedious, and required a great deal of time and effort. It also didn’t do a great job of addressing the core requirements of supply chain security management: The ability to discover and react to risks in real time.
Findings is here to change all of this. Our platform automates supply chain cybersecurity for vendors and enterprises alike. Let us help you save stakeholders from the supply chain security mess that we experienced while making it easy to meet supply chain security challenges head-on using automation and self-assessment.
