Explainers & Guides
4 Proven Cybersecurity Strategy Tips for CISOs
The organisations that can bring your business to a standstill aren't always the ones on your radar. They could be your third-party suppliers, subcontractors, and service providers that you may have not heard of, until something goes wrong.
When critical services fail due to supply chain incidents, the pattern is always the same: a breach at an unknown entity cascades into widespread disruption for household names. 85% of UK cyber security professionals experienced at least one supply chain incident in the past year, according to our 2025 State of Supply Chain Security in the UK report. Yet, the tools and processes we use to manage these risks remain fundamentally unchanged from a simpler era.
The root problem isn't that organisations aren't trying to assess supplier risk, it's that the assessment process itself is broken by design.
Consider the current state: every organisation creates its own security questionnaires, each slightly different from the last. Suppliers receive hundreds of variations of essentially the same questions, creating what industry experts call "assessment fatigue." Meanwhile, security teams spend countless hours maintaining bespoke frameworks instead of focusing on actual risk analysis.
The result is a system that consumes enormous resources whilst generating poor-quality, incomparable data. Worse, it treats each supplier as an isolated entity, missing the crucial web of connections between businesses that drive real-world supply chain risk.
This fragmented approach might have worked back when supply chains were simpler, but today's interconnected business environment demands a fundamental rethink. Modern supply chain attacks don't respect organisational boundaries. They cascade through networks of relationships that most security teams can't even see.
From speaking to customers and industry experts, what we see is a convergence on a crucial insight: effective supply chain security requires standardised approaches that enable collaboration, not just compliance.
This shift represents more than just process improvement. It signals the emergence of an entirely new category of supply chain security. Traditional Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) was built for point-in-time compliance, but what's needed today is a common language of risk, shared in real-time across the supply chain.
True supply chain security recognises three fundamental truths:
This approach doesn't just make supplier assessments more efficient, it transforms them into the foundation for collective defence against sophisticated adversaries.
Not all standardisation efforts are created equal. Effective frameworks for supply chain security share several characteristics:
Industry-wide input
The best frameworks emerge from collaboration between practitioners, regulators, and security experts rather than being developed in isolation.
Risk Ledger’s standardised assessment framework was developed to consolidate a comprehensive and practical control set from industry standards such as ISO27002, Cyber Essentials, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework, SOC2, ASD-Essential 8, and many others.
Control-based approach
Instead of asking "How do you control access to sensitive information?", effective frameworks ask "Do you have multi-factor authentication?"
This enables consistent comparison whilst allowing for implementation flexibility.
Regular evolution
The threat landscape is continuously evolving, and so must the framework we use. It’s a balance we need to strike between maintaining consistency of the framework while keeping pace with industry changes for meaningful comparison and monitoring between organisations.
Risk Ledger updates its framework every six months to incorporate new points of potential exposure and regulatory changes, whilst offering specialised add-on modules for sector-specific requirements like ESG or Financial Controls.
Reducing the burden on suppliers
Suppliers are constantly filling out multiple different variations of assessments with varying questions, resulting in questionnaire fatigue and many business hours lost.
Standardised approaches eliminate this duplication, allowing suppliers to focus on maintaining accurate information for one assessment rather than completing repetitive questionnaires.
Growing adoption value
Standardised frameworks become increasingly valuable as more organisations adopt them, creating efficiencies that benefit the entire ecosystem.
When individual organisations adopt standardised frameworks, they gain efficiency. But when entire supply chain ecosystems, working across industries, embrace the same framework, something far more powerful emerges: collective intelligence.
This is where standardisation transcends process improvement and becomes a strategic capability. Multiple organisations assessing the same suppliers using identical frameworks can compare findings, spot inconsistencies that individual assessments might miss, and collectively improve data quality through peer validation. When multiple security teams review the same supplier data, teams are less likely to miss gaps and risks.
The practical benefits compound quickly too. If 30% of your suppliers have already completed the standardised assessment on their Risk Ledger profile, onboarding your suppliers shifts from weeks of questionnaire exchanges to instant access to verified, up-to-date security information. When emerging threats appear, the collective knowledge of how they impact shared suppliers spreads rapidly across the network rather than being discovered in isolation.
More importantly, this collective approach reveals patterns that individual organisations could never see alone. Concentration risks emerge when multiple clients discover they share the same critical fourth-party dependencies. Industry-wide vulnerabilities become apparent across supplier types and sectors. Response to emerging threats shifts from reactive firefighting to coordinated defence.
This transformation from individual efficiency to collective defence is what makes standardised frameworks the foundation for true supply chain security. It's the difference between managing your own supplier relationships and participating in an ecosystem of shared intelligence and coordinated response.
This visibility is the foundation that enables organisations to Defend-as-One. Without it, organisations remain trapped in the cycle of individual compliance exercises that miss the systemic risks threatening entire sectors.
The question facing security leaders today isn't whether to standardise their supplier assessments. It's how to choose frameworks that enable the collaborative, network-aware approach that modern threats demand.
Supply chain security is evolving from an individual compliance challenge to a collective defence imperative. The organisations that recognise this shift early, and build their TPRM programmes on strong foundations, will be better positioned to defend against the sophisticated adversaries targeting today's interconnected business environment.
The technology and frameworks to enable effective supply chain security exist. The question is whether security teams will embrace them before the next incident forces their hand.
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