Identifying What Matters- Cyber Risks in Your Supply Chain

Managing cyber risks within your supply chain requires a clear understanding of what matters to your organisation. Not all systems, services, or suppliers carry the same level of importance, so being able to identify which ones are critical is the first step.

To do this effectively, organisations should carry out a criticality analysis - this process will evaluate the potential impact of failures, outages, or cyber incidents across your IT systems and services. This helps prioritise resources toward protecting the most essential parts of your infrastructure, including third-party services.

Why Criticality Analysis Matters

Due to limited time and available budget, organisations must focus their efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact. A criticality analysis will highlight which assets, services and supply chains are most vital to your operations, and which suppliers are supporting them. This way, you can make smarter, risk-based decisions about cyber protection and supplier management.

Importantly, this isn’t a one-time exercise. As your business evolves or technology ages the importance or criticality of systems may change. What was once deemed essential may become obsolete, and new services might take on a central role. Ongoing review is therefore essential.

Getting Started: A Practical Approach

While frameworks offer detailed guidance on criticality analysis, not every organisation has the time or resources for a full-scale criticality analysis implementation. A more accessible option to consider is a scorecard or grid-based model to rate the importance of each system and service. The result should be a prioritised list of your key ICT assets, services and the associated supply chains, and how critical they are in terms of availability, confidentiality, and integrity.

To get the most accurate picture, it may be wise to run some workshops with involvement from subject matter experts as a means to gather input, raise awareness, and build consensus.

As you assess your assets, services and associated supply chains, consider the following questions:

• Which systems or services are essential to day-to-day operations?
• What would happen if they went offline?
• Who else, customers or partners, would be affected?
• Are any assets a single point of failure within a larger system?
• Do critical systems rely on other systems to keep running?
• Do these assets contain sensitive data, and what are the risks if that data is exposed?
• Who has access (internally and externally) and how is that access managed?
• How close are these systems to the end of their life cycle?

By answering these questions and documenting your findings, you’ll be better equipped to focus your cyber security efforts and manage your supply chain risks with confidence.

Kaon Security help organisations to address their supply chain cyber risks in the following ways -

• Providing assistance to build their third-party risk profile
• Developing mitigations for third party information security risks
• Integrating third party information security risks into enterprise risk
• Improving an organisation’s visibility of third parties
• Reduction of information security risks associated with the use of third party providers
• Helping to identify information security gaps in the third party’s environment

View our Third Party Cyber Risk Management service to see how we help organisations reduce third-party risk and strengthen their supply chain security.

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