Introduction

A firefighter’s job description of extinguishing fires, using sophisticated firefighting equipment, conducting safety inspections, maintaining equipment, and writing full incident reports will sound familiar to a security specialist.


You are responsible for protecting your organization’s assets, computer systems, networks, and data from security breaches and cyber threats. Your primary role is to monitor, analyze, and respond to security incidents.


With attacks in the supply chain happening every two days, being a security specialist means incessantly ringing fire alarms.


Fast-changing business and threat environments have led to overwork, burnouts, skills gaps, and frustration at the cultural resistance to change (leadership and employees).


This blog will tell you how security specialists can ‘unchain’ from their daily challenges to focus on a security strategy for their organization.

Unchain from paper-based processes through complete digital transformation

Logistics documents like invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, and customs declarations contain product details, shipment tracking information, and financial data which is goldmine for criminals. Day-to-day collaboration between trading partners using fax and telephone calls is a part of this risk.


Digitization of paperwork and processes is the first and the most crucial step towards securing your supply chain. It also means improved accuracy and efficiency, enhanced visibility, and the elimination of manual tasks for employees in favor of more high-added-value ones.


Even though digitization and digitalization is necessary and inevitable, a digital transformation will not solve security problems until it is complete.

 

Defaulting to manual execution any time there’s disruption or a larger crisis is the missing part of this incomplete digital transformation.

Unchain yourself from third party risk with interoperability

Working with each trading partner or vendor in your supply chain means integrating their digital interface with yours to conduct daily operations. Depending on the size of your organization, you could be gatekeeping tens or even hundreds of interfaces. Monitoring thousands of security alerts per day to weed out false-positive alerts and low-threat level alerts from critical alerts that need immediate attention is a tedious task. It is the leading cause of burnouts and security threats going undetected.


Third party risk management to achieve cyber resilience for your organization starts with thinking of supply chain as an ecosystem. It can only be achieved when you protect the entire supply chain ecosystem together.


Interoperability allows all trading partners of a supply chain ecosystem to conduct daily operations on a single decentralized network where all data is encrypted such that each organization has full control over who has access to its data.


With interoperability, you can swiftly respond to a security incident by disconnecting the attacked trading partner from the supply chain ecosystem.

 

There is no burden of conducting due diligence of partners’ IT infrastructure and regular security audits either.

Unchain yourself from compliance burden and skills shortage

Securing legacy technology is your biggest ongoing struggle in achieving cyber resilience. You feel the pressure to keep your organization compliant with ever-changing security standards and regulations. This creates a constant shortage of people and skills in security teams.


Interoperability powered by private blockchain technology dramatically reduces the number of interfaces you have to work with and, consequently also stay compliant with to one. This allows you to focus your skills and resources to strategically approach rising cybercrime in supply chain.

Unchain yourself from insider threats with focus on data security

Authorized users like employees, contractors, or trading partners accidentally compromise an organization’s cyber and data security with incidents like lost laptops and falling for a phishing attack. No matter how secure an organization’s internal digital systems are, if data is being shared over email, spreadsheets, and traditional point-to-point interfaces (EDIs), it is vulnerable to a data breach or could be sold to competitors.


When data is shared on a private blockchain network, it’s end-to-end encrypted and immutable (tamper-evident). All trading partners of a supply-chain ecosystem communicate over the same blockchain network. This eliminates the possibility of attackers impersonating themselves as trading partners to extract confidential information from the insiders of a supply chain.

Conclusion

You can unchain yourself from daily frustrations to instead focus on more strategic initiatives to ensure your organization gets closer to meeting its cyber resilience objectives. The key is to strike the right balance between securing the supply chain and improving the balance between quality and quantity of your work.