I recently presented on how supplier relationships shape cybersecurity risk and why that risk ultimately becomes a reputational and trust challenge for organisations of every size and sector. Below is a summary of the most important lessons I shared, plus practical next steps security leaders can apply today.
Key insights
- Reputation is your top asset. A cyber incident isn’t just an IT problem – it damages customer trust, partner confidence, and market position. Prevention and preparedness are investments in the brand.
- Outsourcing may amplify risk. Every supplier, cloud service or managed service provider is an additional attack surface. Risks change constantly; one-off checks are insufficient.
- Contracts are security controls. Well-drafted SLAs, notification timelines, audit rights and liability clauses materially affect containment speed and public response.
- Transparency protects trust. Honest, timely communications with customers, partners and regulators, backed by demonstrable controls, reduce reputational harm when incidents occur.
- Translate security into business impact. Boards and executives respond to customer-impact, revenue risk and recovery cost metrics – not technical detail.
Practical steps for leaders
- Continuous third-party risk management. Maintain an up-to-date supplier inventory, classify by criticality, and monitor posture (patching, certs, public exposure) continuously.
- Bake security into procurement. Require baseline controls and escalation paths before onboarding vendors; treat security clauses as non-negotiable for critical services.
- Test coordination with partners. Run realistic tabletop exercises that include legal, communication and executive teams to validate response roles, timelines and contractual remedies.
- Design for resilience. Use segmentation, redundancy for critical services and strong encryption to reduce blast radius and speed recovery.
- Report in business terms. Present vendor KPIs (time-to-detect, time-to-contain, patch cadence) tied to customer impact, regulatory exposure and cost-to-recover.
Cybersecurity is a business discipline: it protects customers, preserves revenue and safeguards brand value. Treat third-party risk as a continuous business risk, use contracts to enforce accountability and practice honest communications – these three moves shift security from a compliance check-box to a strategic advantage.
Cyber Security Leadership 