NormShield Now Allows You to Quantify Supply Chain Risk in Dollars. But Is That a Good Thing?
Normshield recently announced that it has licensed the FAIR model to allow customers to quantify supply chain security risk in terms of financial impacts. It is innovative, but is it useful?
Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) is a methodology for calculating information security risk. It initially gained popularity for its pioneering structured approach towards assessing and quantifying different components of risk. However, FAIR’s proprietary nature and licensing requirements have restricted its use. This announcement means that NormShield customers can now take advantage of FAIR to help measure supply chain risk in terms of potential financial impacts.
“Incorporating the FAIR Model into cyber risk assessments enables organizations to effectively quantify the true financial cyber risk to their bottom lines,” said Mohamoud Jibrell, CEO of NormShield. “Companies now can have a three-dimensional view of the technical, compliance and financial impact of a cyberattack to better understand the full risk relationship with a partner or supplier. For some, the business benefits will outweigh the cyber risks but for others it may not.”
Our Take
In the still fledgling but rather crowded market for Cyber Risk Ratings, innovation that provides customer value may be the best shortcut to the front of the pack. The use of FAIR to quantify supply chain risk is definitely innovative, but the jury is still out on how much customer value it will deliver. Cyber Risk Ratings only scratch the surface when it comes to vendor risk, so many of the factors used to quantify that risk will necessarily be highly speculative. Customers will find no value in reports that are overly ambiguous, so NormShield’s job is to make sure that its customers can have confidence in the results.