PurchTips edition #440

Cyber Security is an at front and center of the modern supply chain thought processes. Procurement Professionals are required to ensure that their organizations are protected from risks that impact their ability to manage to spend and support operations. The management of spend, support of operations, and shielding organizations from risks is the mission of procurement departments, the reason for their existence.

The Procurement Function is responsible for ensuring a consistent supply of raw material inputs to be utilized by their own conversion or manufacturing processes to produced useful outputs, products, and services that customers are willing to pay for. Cyber Threats can be present in all these activities and can come from all stakeholder groups. Therefore, Cyber Threats can come from internal and external (suppliers, partners, customers) sources.

What are at risks at hand? Everything, corporate secrets, mission-critical recipes, formulas, process data breaches, metrics, sensitive customer information breaches, financial data breaches, lawsuits, brand damage, loss of goodwill, crippling supply chain disruption, and so on.

Procurement Professionals must acquire the skills to collaborate with their IT Departments to do the following:

1. Identify Points of Cyber Attack in supply chain processes which are the most impactful. The key is to understand the severity of threats, the total number of current intrusions, and the ability of current defense mechanism to detect and neutralize cyber threats
2. Leverage Computer Hardening processes which create buffer zones around IT systems to shield them from cyber-attacks. A major component of this is to ensure that all activities that do not create value for a business should be curtailed to reduce the probability of cyber-attack
3. Audit supplier cyber security capability to determine the degree of risks they pose to the buying organizations. Audits include supplier selection processes and ongoing performance monitoring processes
4. Deploy a Cyber Threat Response Plan which provides protocol on what constitutes a cyber-attack occurs, who is responses, when, where, and how to respond.
5. Hold procurement staff accountable for cybersecurity processes in their sphere. This is best done when integrated into the performance criteria of the procurement staff. The idea is to create a Pocket of Cyber Security Excellence within the Procurement Organization.

The Better Business Bureau recommends that managers tell their employees the following:

• Not to open e-mail from unknown sources
• What to do when they receive suspicious e-mail (when in doubt, delete!)
• To disconnect from the Internet when not online
• To consider the risks of file-sharing
• How to perform data back-up procedures
• Actions to take if their computers become infected.

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