Cedric Tan
General Manager (Singapore, Thailand & Indonesia)
You outsourced your IT. You handed over cloud, backup, even cybersecurity to trusted partners. You did everything a smart business should do.
But now your vendor’s vendor gets breached, and suddenly, it’s your customer data on the line. Your operations offline. Your reputation in question.
This is the part no one warned you about. You outsourced everything but the risk.
We explored this previously in our article on supply chain cyber threats. But in 2025, the landscape has shifted. Regulatory frameworks like Cyber Essentials and Cyber Trust in Singapore are now surfacing dependencies that many businesses didn’t realise they had. Threat actors are moving faster than ever, and clients and insurers are asking harder questions.
You may not have chosen these risks. But the accountability still lands on your desk.
Certifications are exposing what businesses had long assumed was outsourced. One breach upstream can trigger a cascade. Visibility is now a requirement, not a luxury. And resilience is no longer just about your own systems but about the ones you depend on but don’t control.
Certification Raised the Alarm. Now What?
Regulators are not asking businesses to do something new but are just asking them to prove what they thought was already in place. Frameworks like Cyber Essentials and Cyber Trust in Singapore are bringing that to the surface. On paper, these schemes aim to help businesses improve internal cyber hygiene such as secure passwords, backups, user access, malware protection, and employee awareness. However, while they expose supply chain risk, they do not solve it.
These certifications assume the business has visibility and control over its technology stack. That assumption breaks down the moment core systems are outsourced to vendors who themselves rely on cloud platforms, subcontractors, and external integrations. The certification questions are still pointed at you, even when the answers live somewhere else.
This creates an uncomfortable moment for many companies. They begin to realise they cannot say with certainty where their data is, who manages their backups, or which platforms have administrator access. That is not a failure of diligence. It is a failure of design since businesses were not built to interrogate what had been trusted by default.
Meanwhile, enterprise companies and public sector buyers are raising their standards. Certifications are becoming procurement filters. Insurance underwriters are revising their assumptions. The business that cannot describe its supply chain will soon find itself excluded from more than just compliance. What about smaller organizations such as SMEs and mid-market companies?
What certification surfaces is not always what businesses want to see but once seen, cannot be ignored. The next move is not more paperwork. It is taking back strategic visibility and finding ways to validate what was once assumed.
Your Vendor Has Vendors. That’s Your Problem Too.
Most businesses today do not run sprawling internal IT departments. Instead, they outsource most or all infrastructure, cloud services, security, or development to a handful of trusted providers. It is simple business and operation logic to outsource what is not core, reduce complexity, and focus on growth.
The problem is the lack of visibility into what those outsourced vendors depend on. Your managed service provider may be using a backup vendor based overseas. Your developer might host code on a platform that also powers dozens of other clients. Your HR system could be pulling data through a third-party API that has never been reviewed.
These layers are rarely documented, let alone tested. But when something goes wrong, it is still your business on the hook. Regulators, customers, and insurers do not stop at the third party. They ask what you did to understand the risk you took on.
A ransomware attack on your provider’s provider still knocks out your operations. A breach in a subcontracted service can leak your customer data. A misconfiguration in a shared platform can introduce vulnerabilities into your environment without your team ever touching a line of code.
And yet most businesses do not know where to start. Contracts are vague. Relationships are distant. The risks are invisible until they are very visible.
Outsourcing was meant to reduce operational burden. But it also redistributed exposure in ways that now require a different kind of oversight. The kind that does not rely on trust alone.
Where Control Starts, Even If You Don’t Own the Stack
Taking back control certainly does not mean building everything in-house. It means knowing what matters, what’s at stake, and where validation is non-negotiable.
Start with a conversation, not a tool. Map out your service providers and ask them direct questions. Who else do you depend on? Where is our data stored? Who monitors your systems? Most businesses only need to follow the thread two or three layers deep before they uncover gaps they were never aware of.
From there, prioritise. Not every supplier needs scrutiny. Focus on the ones who, if compromised, would disrupt operations, trigger regulatory fallout, or affect customer trust. These are your critical dependencies. Others may be important or low impact, but clarity matters. Without it, everything feels equally urgent or equally invisible.
For your critical vendors, act. Ask for evidence of cyber hygiene. If they cannot provide a basic policy, recent test result, or certification, that’s a signal. If they can, do not take it at face value but certainly verify. A light-touch penetration test, compromise assessment, or policy review goes further than another form.
Do not leave your own environment out of scope. Even if the breach starts upstream, recovery almost always lands on you. That means backups must work. Incident response plans must be known, not just written. And your team — internal or external — must know how to respond when the alert comes from a system you did not build.
Sometimes the answer is to switch vendors but more often, the answer is to shift posture. Choose partners who are transparent, who respond to questions, who show up for joint exercises. Security cannot be retrofitted after a breach. It needs to be part of the relationship.
This is how control begins — not by owning every layer, but by refusing to leave the important ones unquestioned.
Making the Invisible Actionable
Cybots does not exist to replace your IT partner or to manage your vendors for you. What we offer is a structured way to bring clarity and resilience into environments where visibility is often limited and assumptions are rarely tested.
For organizations beginning their journey toward certification, Cybots provides a pre-certification review that identifies gaps in cyber hygiene, highlights hidden dependencies, and prepares your business to answer hard questions from auditors and customers alike. This is not a checklist exercise. It is a readiness engagement shaped by real-world threats.
For those already certified, we help validate assumptions and uncover weak links through targeted services. Our penetration testing and compromise assessment offerings are designed not just to test your perimeter, but also to identify the risks introduced by vendors and third-party integrations. These services are scaled for businesses. They do not require an internal security team to act on findings.
We also offer consulting support for SMEs looking to establish structured vendor evaluation frameworks, incorporate supplier risks into their business continuity planning, or conduct tabletop exercises that simulate third-party compromise scenarios. These are strategic steps that can be taken without building a full security department in-house.
Businesses do not often need more technology but a partner who understands their scale, sees the invisible, and helps convert exposure into control. That is what Cybots is built for.
Resilience Is Not a Checkbox
Supply chain cyber risk is showing up in insurance claims, regulatory audits, customer escalations, and missed renewal deals. Businesses are being caught off guard not because they ignored security, but because they assumed someone else had it covered.
Certifications have moved the conversation forward. They have introduced structure and created shared language. However, structure alone does not stop cascading failures. A supplier’s good intentions do not roll back data loss. A policy on paper is not the same as a tested response plan.
Resilience is not something you audit into existence. It has to be demonstrated under pressure, across systems, and often at the worst possible time.
This is not about becoming unbreakable but about becoming recoverable, and that means treating vendor compromise not as an edge case, but as a scenario you are ready for. Because when it happens, it will not be your vendor’s name in the headlines. It will be yours.
Resilience begins with visibility. The rest follows from there.
Validate Before You Delegate
Resilience is not something you want to discover during a crisis.
Leading organisations are no longer asking whether they are secure. They are asking whether they can recover — and whether their partners can too. That shift is defining the next phase of cyber maturity, especially for businesses that rely on third parties for critical systems.
Validation is how that maturity begins. Not just scanning for vulnerabilities, but pressure testing assumptions. Can you detect a breach introduced through a supplier integration? Can you recover your data without depending on the vendor who lost it? Can your team respond when something breaks outside your control?
These questions are not meant to induce fear. They are meant to surface risk while there is still time to act.
To help with that, Cybots offers a limited number of complimentary Compromise Assessments each month. This is a practical starting point for organisations that want to move from awareness to clarity — and from assumptions to evidence.
Contact Cybots to schedule your assessment and take a confident step towards continuity, trust, and the ability to face what others didn’t prepare for.
