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24/06/2026 11:27 pm
TL;DR: Global supply chains remain vulnerable to cascading disruption from pandemics, geopolitics, supplier instability, weather, and cyberattacks, according to Pathlock. The practical lesson is that resilience now depends on visibility, contingency planning, and diversified sourcing rather than cost optimisation alone.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Pathlock: Introduction to Global Supply Chains and supply chain risk mitigation
By the numbers:
- A report produced by Dr John Lee and published by the United States Studies Centre states that 51000 companies were impacted globally, with direct suppliers only in the Wuhan region of China.
- 25% of the Chief Supply Chain Officers are, ficers are confident that their networks are highly resilient.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations reduce supply chain concentration risk?
A: They should identify every critical dependency that rests on one supplier, one geography, or one transport path, then create approved alternatives before disruption occurs.
Q: Why do just-in-time models fail during major disruptions?
A: Just-in-time models fail because they remove slack from the system.
Q: How can teams know whether their supply chain resilience is real?
A: Resilience is real only if the organisation has tested alternate suppliers, rerouting options, recovery ownership, and decision thresholds under realistic scenarios.
Practitioner guidance
- Build a tiered dependency map Document tier one, tier two, and critical upstream dependencies for each essential product or service, then assign owners for each handoff and constraint.
- Replace single-source assumptions with dual-path planning Identify where one supplier, one region, or one transport path creates concentration risk and pre-approve alternate sourcing or routing options.
- Stress-test disruption scenarios Run simulations for port closures, border restrictions, supplier insolvency, and cyber incidents so response teams can rehearse decisions before real disruption arrives.
What's in the full article
Pathlock's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The article expands on specific supply chain disruption categories, including economic, environmental, geopolitical, and internal risks.
- It discusses the shift from single-source and just-in-time models toward redundancy, stress testing, and contingency planning.
- It outlines practical mitigation tactics such as supplier diversification, geographic decentralisation, and data-driven monitoring.
- It includes the pandemic as a case example of how regional disruption cascaded into global shortages and logistics failure.
👉 Read Pathlock's analysis of global supply chain risk and resilience →
Global supply chain resilience: what IAM and risk teams should note?
Explore further
25/06/2026 8:21 am
Visibility debt, not just supplier count, is the real supply chain governance gap. The article keeps returning to end-to-end visibility, which is the correct control problem. Organisations cannot govern what they cannot see, and the risk is amplified when tier two and indirect dependencies are invisible. The practitioner conclusion is that resilience work begins with dependency mapping, not with slogans about agility.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own supply chain risk management when disruptions hit?
A: Ownership should sit across procurement, operations, logistics, finance, and executive leadership, with a central view of risk and recovery decisions. Disruption crosses organisational boundaries, so the response model must be shared rather than siloed. That is how fragmented risk becomes manageable.
👉 Read our full editorial: Global supply chain resilience depends on visibility, not cost alone
