Assessing the digital security of your supply chain is important to protect your business from cyber threats.

Suppliers are an integral part of your business processes, and a weak link in their cybersecurity can directly impact your organization. Think data breaches, operational disruptions and reputational damage.

How can you mitigate these risks? It starts with compiling a comprehensive list of all your suppliers. Often these are more than you think, and they are not always the parties you have immediately in mind, such as a commodity supplier or IT service provider. Also consider small but essential organizations on which your business depends heavily, such as a critical parts supplier or a logistics partner. Mapping this entire supply chain is the first step toward effective risk management and resilient operations.

Engage your colleagues in this process to complete the list of suppliers. Consider accounts payable, purchasing, marketing, manufacturing and HR departments. Each department has unique insights and contacts that can help create a complete picture of all involved suppliers within your organization. Collaboration between different departments increases the accuracy of the list and at the same time reinforces awareness of the importance of cybersecurity throughout the organization.

Do you have a smaller organization? Nice. Then compiling the list will probably be accomplished faster using the invoices and payables in your accounting system as a source.

Once the list is compiled, you can move on to rating your suppliers. An efficient way to do this is with a tool that calculates a cyber rating for each supplier. You enter your supplier list and, in the background, a standardized set of online checks is run on each supplier. Then you see your supplier list returned with a cyber rating for each supplier. At a glance you can see the strong and weak links.

It is then up to you to take any action to mitigate risks, such as conducting further research, engaging in dialogue or seeking alternative parties. Or you decide to accept the risks. That, of course, is also possible.