How Vulnerable is Your Supply Chain IT? And How Does Your Microsoft Dynamics ERP Solution Factor In?

Typically, the phrase "supply chain vulnerability" brings to mind physical threats like natural disasters that shut suppliers down, striking port workers, and hijackers who target truckloads of high-value goods. If a new report from Gartner is on target, four years from now that list will also include a wide range of information technology (IT) threats.

In the report, Living in a World Without Trust: When IT's Supply Chain Integrity and Online Infrastructure Get Pwned ("pwned" is a slang term made up by the hacker community that translates into being "owned" or beaten by an opponent) the research firm says that by 2017, IT supply chain integrity will be identified as a top security-related concern by Global 2000 IT leaders.

"IT supply chain integrity issues are real, and will have mainstream enterprise IT impact within the next five years," said Neil MacDonald, research vice president and Gartner Fellow, in the report. "In the shorter term, the market for information security offerings will fragment along geopolitical lines."

"In the longer term, the same will happen for OSs and other IT system infrastructure software, reshaping the IT landscape moving forward," MacDonald continued. "Enterprise IT departments must begin to make changes today to protect their systems and information in a world where all IT systems are suspect. These changes in information protection strategies will help enterprises embrace and adopt cloud computing and consumerization, which have strikingly similar issues with untrusted systems."

Microsoft Dynamics ERP users should already have the tools to protect their systems right at their fingertips. Bryan Ball, author of Aberdeen Group's recent report,