Mitigating “Information and Communications Technology” (ICT) Supply Chain Risks has been evolving for over three decades. How might you consider your maturity or effectiveness in 2021?
- Supply Chain Security
- Physical Security
- Cyber Security
- Personnel Security (inclusive of Company Leadership)
- Supply Chain Integrity
- Hardware Integrity
- Software Integrity
- Supply Chain Resilience
- Supply Chain Quality
- Supply Chain Management and Supplier Governance
What has your organization done in the past 3 years to raise the level of trusted supply chains to ensure the Security, Integrity and Resilience for products and services?
Unfortunately, organizations during 2020 encountered significant set backs in achieving higher levels of trust in security, integrity and resilience due to the entire “Work-From-Home” (WFH) reality.
The better news is that the levels of adoption of new processes for working remote have been established and refined in the past 14 months.
Now ICT Leadership shall move more rapidly to raise the assurance and the trustworthiness of the suppliers and products they have adopted for our "4th Industrial Revolution".
As "5G" emerges into our next generation of the “Internet-of-Things” (IOT) and the increasing integration with “Operational Technology” to the Internet and race back to the Moon expands, our supply chain risks will be more exponential.
A recent Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis Reference Aid (RA) April 16 2021, captured data from the US Department of Justice National Security Division:
Analysts identified 94 individuals from a single country arrested over the past 3 years involved in “Espionage Activity”. This includes:
- Proprietary US Intellectual Property
- Academic Research
- Private Sector Sensitive Information
So what?
As the leader of your small innovative business, or the CxO of a Fortune 500 company or the VP of Information Technology at a private mid-size organization, you should increase your “Supply Chain” focus now.
Industry 4.0 is on our near horizon and you will never have all of your employees or suppliers inside your own four walls or virtual perimeter.
The United States is entering a new era of progress and simultaneously another compliance / governance set of rules, laws and mandates.
Business leaders focus on “Operational Risk Management” (ORM) and Critical Infrastructure Protection will be rising again in 2021, just as the last 2008-2009 financial sector risks became a reality.
What can you do next?
“Information and Communications Technology” (ICT) Supply Chain Risks start from the inside and remain your greatest vulnerability. Perhaps the best way forward next, is for us to study the past. Read this one page synopsis of just one event in 2009 here…
