The supply chain is under a historic amount of pressure, but the strain on its cybersecurity and risk management may be in even worse condition. As 2021 draws to a close, the global supply chain is in a state comparable to rush-hour traffic in bad weather. Everything seems to be backed up whether due to supply and demand issues, wait times at shipping ports, or any number of other delays.

Third-party risk management (TPRM) has grown in prominence as organizations increase their reliance on external parties, from cloud providers to credit card processors. As more enterprises invest in this critical business function, certain best practices are becoming key to a successful TPRM program.

Following the 2021 cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline that caused a nationwide supply-chain disruption, numerous cybersecurity companies and federal agencies increased their efforts to find and shut down ransomware groups and curb the rise of cyberattacks. Those efforts have resulted in the shutdown of ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) groups such as DarkSide and REvil, which had been targeting critical infrastructure including healthcare providers of financial systems.

Businesses have always had to manage risk – everything from operational, financial, or strategic risks; to other risks that are reputational, regulatory, or cybersecurity-related. So how does enterprise risk management (ERM) work today, when so many businesses are moving so much of their operations into the cloud? How can CISOs and other senior executives take traditional ERM principles and apply them to the cloud-based technology that underpins so much of the modern enterprise?

Risk culture is the set of shared beliefs, attitudes, and understanding among a group, usually in a corporate environment, about risk and risk management practices. A company has a strong risk culture when all employees understand the business and regulatory landscape in which the organization functions, and what risks are acceptable within that landscape to achieve business objectives.

You can't do business without your vendors. They support critical elements of your organization, from cloud storage services to payment processing to physical items like office supplies or physical components. Your vendors make your organization run more efficiently – but sometimes at a risk to your financial, reputational and operational resiliency.

By 2025, there will be more than 100 zettabytes of data stored in the cloud – that’s a lot of data! With more applications needing to process a significant amount of data in real-time, there is a shift in demand for distributed cloud and edge computing. Fortunately, the distributed cloud brings many impressive benefits to organizations – generating immense cost savings, greater scalability, and reaching resource-intensive business demands.

The past two years have brought about significant disruptions to global supply chains. Recent headlines have focused on labor shortages and their impact on everything from product production to shipping delays. However, another, more significant supply chain issue should be top of mind for every organization: supply chain attacks.

As organizations look to take their 2022 security concerns head-on, they need to create resilient cybersecurity programs that help them make smarter, faster, informed decisions. In our recent webinar, I had the pleasure of chatting with security professionals Mike Wilkes from SecurityScorecard, Scott Fuller from Access Health, and John Beal from St. Charles Health. They discuss the challenges they face and how their security plans for 2022 to mitigate risk across their entire ecosystem.

Most organizations use at least some (and perhaps many) external vendors in their daily operations, sometimes even to provide mission-critical services or supplies; we’ve discussed them before as third-party vendors and the risks they bring. Indeed, most businesses today already consider third-party risk management in their overall cybersecurity protocols.