Btissam Laaouina is a highly motivated Cyber security manager. She graduated from Turin’s polytechnic (Italy), where she studied telecommunications engineering and digital transformation. Btissam holds a variety of remarkable certifications, including CCISO, CISSP, CISM, ITIL V4, and MORE. She is a prominent figure in the cybersecurity industry, noted for her passion and broad understanding of the field. Her other interests include nature, mountains, horseback riding, and beekeeping. She was picked in 2024 as one of the amazing women who are making an impact in computing security. Not only that! Btissam speaks Arabic, French, English, Italian, German, and Spanish.
Digital supply chains are more complex than ever before, so how can we have perfect visibility over them? Here’s a new piece of software that promises to unlock all the secrets of your supply chain and take your supply chain transparency to a whole new level. With this software, you’ll not only be able to track all your direct suppliers, but also you’ll continue to trace their suppliers, and then their suppliers, and keep going all the way down the rabbit hole. It’s called an SCBoM – a Supply Chain Bill of Materials. Although SCBoM is not yet available commercially, it promises to shake up the corporate transparency landscape like nothing else before.
Why Suppliers Matter in the Chain
In our increasingly global economy, as we’ve seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, any weaknesses in any given supplier can quickly cascade throughout the entire supply chain. If an attack occurs, such as a cyberattack on a critical supplier, this can slow down delivery times, threaten quality, or interrupt your whole supply chain operation. By alerting companies to the locations of risk, SCBoM allows businesses to proactively pick suppliers who won’t later jeopardise operations with unnecessary disruptions on the horizon.
Merging SBOM and HBOM for Full Visibility
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of SCBoM is its proper interoperation with SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) and HBOM (Hardware Bill of Materials), putting all the controls and parts across all physical and cyber products into the supply chain in an integrated and consistent way. This greatly enhances the visibility of risks, not just to the physical products a company manufactures, but more importantly, to the software controls needed to operate those things reliably, securely and sustainably. It will fully map things for the first time.
Assessing Cybersecurity with SCBoM
One of the greatest advantages of SCBoM is that it can score a suppliers’ cyber-resilience on forums such as NIST CSF 2.0 and NIS2, allowing a business to assess potential cybersecurity issues before they turn into a problem. If stakes are too high, the buyer can even break off the partnership. This means that SCBoM can help protect the entire chain, avoiding a production or delivery interruption.
Staying Ahead of Risks with SCBoM
SCBoM allows companies to flag issues early on – long before some piece of equipment fails, the wrong material arrives, or a cyber-attack disrupts a supply chain. Such attacks are notoriously difficult to detect, so prevention is better than a cure, and SCBoM is going to be necessary to ensure that products are safe and compliant with relevant regulations, which can be either on a country-by-country basis or international. The increasing regulations that companies need to comply with will only accelerate, and SCBoM will provide the resource needed to shape compliance.
The Future of Supply Chain Management
As trade activities and regulatory requirements grow in complexity, SCBoM is becoming increasingly vital for firms as a means of not only staying compliant with global laws but also enabling them to control their supply chains more efficiently. There is a likely high level of limpidity and better accountability which are the foundation of a twenty first century business, and SCBoM tends to avail that discernibility and regulation mechanism that companies need to survive in their competitive industries.
More so, SCBoM will years to come become the best friend of most business, providing clarity to supply chain and leading a clear path through which businesses will thrive.