At CyberSheath, we’ve worked with forward-thinking clients who want to get ahead of supply chain risk management (SCRM) and engage with their suppliers. We have extensive experience in DFARS and CMMC compliance, providing comprehensive services that streamline and simplify supply chain risk management processes.
If you are interested in enumerating your supply chain, assessing your supply chain, and moving in the direction where the various requirements are headed, we can help. Gaining visibility into your supply chain enhances your cybersecurity and allows your organization to proactively manage the risks of engaging with third parties.
Be sure to read the first two blogs in this series to learn about SCRM basics and supply chain risk management strategies.
The CyberSheath SCRM Approach
Below are the service components and operational processes that we execute today to help our clients implement SCRM programs.
- Supplier/third party categorization: We start by categorizing your suppliers. We engage with you and establish what that categorization is. We need to understand what you need and then we have a process to get to a point where categorization is rinse and repeat as we move through and review your supplier roster.
- Risk assessment and continuous monitoring: We then conduct the primary assessment, making sure to keep an eye out for changes through monitoring that allow us to adapt as relates to your supply chain.
- Compliance reporting and executive briefings: This process involves determining if you are falling below or above your risk threshold and what your actions should be if you are exceeding that marker. The reporting piece could be our team alerting you that we’ve done our risk assessments of the selected clients and we see some that are above the risk threshold necessitating you to make decisions. That type of reporting keeps everybody informed on the operational outcomes as well as risks presented through the risk assessment process.
- Training and support: We identify the boots on the ground when it comes to reporting changes in your supply chain relationships. Somebody is a lead within the organization, and they are trained to report if situations change in the nature of the engagement.
The benefits
Since we have these processes documented on the CyberSheath side, and it’s governed maturely with procedure and executed operationally, it’s relatively straightforward for us to perform these activities.
As a defense industrial base contractor, you can certainly manage supplier risk management yourself, but if you don’t have the resources or the capability, CyberSheath can assist with rapidly putting these processes into place as we possess expertise and resourcing to speed progress and implementation.
Supply chain risk management is becoming increasingly important. Every cybersecurity standard seems to be getting supply chain risk management requirements embedded, including NIST 800-171, Revision 3, which is on the horizon. As it is unfolding, CMMC has a supply chain risk management component as well.
It’s best to prepare and understand the requirements as they’re taking shape—and there is an expectation that there will be proactive supply chain risk management needed across the defense industrial base as these requirements come to fruition.
Contact us with any questions you may have on how CyberSheath can help you meet regulatory compliance.