For the electronics manufacturing industry, procurement relies on an ecosystem of suppliers, organizations, and individuals to form a complete supply chain, and must count on partners to take precautions to ensure a successful management of supply chain risk management through the entire procurement cycle.
Don’t overlook supply chain security
The focus of the electronics supply chain centers on metrics, cost, and efficiency, and overlooking supply chain security is a common problem. This is very dangerous, however. As you depend on partners to provide the good and services you need throughout the supply chain, you must also depend on them to take appropriate precautions to secure valuable information.
A third-party data breach is a major consideration for organizations. A study by the Ponemon Institute found that 56% of companies had suffered a security incident that originated with a third-party vendor. And even though 57% of organizations do not have a firm grasp on the security practices of third party suppliers or vendors, they continue to share sensitive information – and only 18% of those companies know if their vendors share sensitive data with other companies.
Electronics manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers are at risk for losing out on major business deals when data is unsecured and competitive pricing is compromised.
The Widespread Impact of Security Failures
Some of the most highly publicized and best-known data breaches to date were the result of a security lapse on the part of a vendor. For example, the 2013 Target data breach was caused when attackers compromised a HVAC provider to gain access to Target’s network. That attack alone resulted in 110 million lost records and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to Target. More recently, last year’s Verizon data breach was caused when a third-party customer service provider left six months of call records in a non-secured, publicly accessible Amazon A3 bucket.
Regulators are beginning to take notice as well. Last year, New York state financial regulators began to require companies to evaluate vendor cybersecurity, while in Europe, next year’s GDPR will levy fines of up to 4% of total global revenue to companies that are found to have lax security practices.
Information security is no longer an internal concern, but must be considered and verified all up and down the electronic component supply chain. The Ponemon study found that if an organization takes charge of evaluating vendor security, the risk of a breach falls by an estimated 20% – from 66% to 46%.
What Solutions are Available for the Rampant Security Flaws?
Orbweaver Lockbox, a key component of the Orbweaver Platform, provides a complete security solution for transmitting sensitive data throughout the entire supply chain. Information can be uploaded in any format, from any source, and encrypted with a proprietary encryption sequence and further base64 encoded for comprehensive protection.
Lockbox provides security for clients to the granular level, with version-specific control features. Customers can manage access, review client access records, and set expiration dates on a file-by-file basis. Data in only accessible by the client, Orbweaver does not even have insight into the data kept in your Lockbox; so data in the system will never be shared or used for purposes of analysis.
Request a free consultation with Orbweaver to improve your company’s procurement cycle security and learn more about our automation and supply chain solutions.
