endor relationships are critical to an organization’s supply chain both upstream and downstream, but how can an astute executive management team understand how their partners are equipped to protect their proprietary economic knowledge?
A fundamental tenet of the new supply chain is that information is as highly valued as raw materials or finished goods across an organization’s network. At each vendor’s junction point to a company, its affiliates, subsidiaries and team of business connections, there are considerable openings for critical data flows to be accessed by cyber criminals.
“Villainc” by Caricature
Because of the increasingly complex and fluid nature of supply chain dynamics, there is an ever-greater emphasis on pinpointing how information is transmitted, who is handling it, and to what extent this dissemination can affect a company’s cybersecurity protection protocols. As recently as the Home Depot breach, the access point for the 56 million debit and credit card accounts and 53 million customer email addresses harvested by cyber thieves came as a result of a third-party vendor’s user name and password usage.
The idea of labeling suppliers in logistics, operations, marketing and sales as “villainous” may at first glance be hyperbole, to the extent that vendors are usually trusted partners who are fundamental pieces of a company’s organic growth proposition. The characterization of these suppliers as “villainous” indicates that they may be adversely impacting a firm through actions that expose the commodity of information through clumsy, inefficient, or obsolete safeguards.
