Ask a security team what keeps them up at night lately and you will hear the same phrase: supply chain. The big breaches of the past few years increasingly start not at the target company, but at a smaller vendor with access to it. The bookkeeping firm, the software provider, the HVAC contractor with a login to the building system.
For a small business this cuts both ways. Your vendors can be the door into your systems, and you can be the door into your clients’ systems. Neither role is comfortable.
Questions worth asking your vendors
You do not need a procurement department to do basic diligence:
- Who at your company can access our data, and how is that access protected?
- Do you use multifactor authentication internally?
- When did you last test restoring from your backups?
- If you get breached, how quickly will you tell us?
A vendor who answers those quickly is a keeper. A vendor who gets defensive just told you something important.
And the mirror version
Your clients are starting to ask you the same questions, especially if you serve medical, financial, or legal businesses. Having good answers is quietly becoming a sales advantage. The businesses that can say yes, we have MFA everywhere, our backups are tested, and here is our incident plan are winning deals against competitors who cannot.
Want to be the vendor with good answers? Book a free consultation and we will get your story straight before someone asks.