What is meant by the letters SCRM? Well, it’s the abbreviation of Supply Chain Risk Management. So why is it important? And are the SCRM best practices?
Why Is SCRM Important?
Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) is a series of strategies and activities for continuous risk monitoring. Along the supply chain, this reduces IT vulnerabilities. Aside from that, this ensures business continuity.
From a cybersecurity perspective, SCRM involves, monitoring all vendors. And this may include those with whom you do not have direct contact. And that ensures all controls remain effective at all times.
Identify The Known Risks
It’s the first step to an effective SCRM. This means you have to identify the following:
- Vendors
- Customers
- Systems, networks, and software that they access
- Where they access your IT ecosystem
- What sensitive information they access or transmit
Establishing A SCRM Framework
You need to set one for accepting and transferring. As well as mitigating and refusing supply chain risks. In doing this, you need to do the following considerations:
- First, determine the critical vendors and customers.
- Analyze the impact that their data breach would have on your security posture.
- Prioritize SCRM strategies for the vendors and customers who are at the highest risk.
- Finally, determine whether any single points of failure exist.
Additionally, if you start with security issues that you can control, then it will help you govern your information security program.
Monitor The Risks
This can be overwhelming. So you should prioritize and focus on the supply stream members. These members are the most likely to pose the highest data security risks.
After you establish these, you may want to consider the following:
- The patching cadence. How do they often install security patches?
- Network security. Consider how well they manage firewalls and cloud configurations. As well as databases.
- Endpoint security. Consider also how secure are the laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. As well as the employee devices accessing the network.
- Web application security. How are they protecting from web attacks such as cross-site scripting or SQL attacks?
Therefore, organizations can gain insight into their high-risk supply chain partner’s security controls. And that is achieved by using the right automated tools.
Creating A Risk-Aware Culture To Manage Unknown Risks
To manage an unknown risk within a supply chain is a difficult part of SCRM. That’s because it’s impossible to verify what you don’t know. Still, building a strong defense is the best offense. So the following are the strategies for creating a risk-aware culture. Thus mitigating the unknown risks.
- Training employees. It will be helpful if you ensure that everyone in the organization understands the impact of cybersecurity risk across the ecosystem.
- Clear communications are also important You also need to define and communicate the organization’s risk tolerance from the top to bottom. This helps ensure that stakeholders make informed decisions when working with vendors and customers.
- Agility. This also means responding rapidly to new risks. As empowering stakeholders to mitigate them effectively.
Moreover, creating a culture of risk-awareness prevents some of the unknown risks the organization may face. This means that you are limiting the unknown risks through developing a culture of risk-awareness.
Furthermore, you can also incorporate risk-awareness as part of your vendor due diligence process.