Dependency and Supply-Chain Risk
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Limit dependencies, review provenance and updates, lock versions appropriately, and maintain a response path for critical advisories.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain dependency and supply-chain risk in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Limit dependencies, review provenance and updates, lock versions appropriately, and maintain a response path for critical advisories.
- Recognise this material risk: a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process.
- Use this review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong. This lesson gives you a concrete question to take into a build brief, proposal review, or product decision.
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? The course example is A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations; use it to decide what evidence would justify the choice before a builder implements it.
What Does Dependency and Supply-chain Risk Mean for Your Product?
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong.
Use the illustrative service for this course (A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations) to make the choice concrete. Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident?
Technical term
Dependency and Supply-Chain Risk
Supply-chain risk arises when libraries, build tools, services, updates, or maintainers can affect the security and availability of the product.
How Should a Founder Use Dependency and Supply-chain Risk?
For a small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations, ask what would happen if a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process.
For this decision, the useful standard is that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Decision: Limit dependencies, review provenance and updates, lock versions appropriately, and maintain a response path for critical advisories.
- Evidence to request: show that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Owner: name who will respond if a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process.
- Record the result in the security, ownership, and handover record.
- Practical review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
How Do You Choose an Approach to Dependency and Supply-chain Risk?
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Limit dependencies, review provenance and updates, lock versions appropriately, and maintain a response path for critical advisories.
The risk is that a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process. Compare a simpler option with the proposed one, including who will operate either choice.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
What Evidence Should You Accept for Dependency and Supply-chain Risk?
What Warning Signs Should You Look For?
- The proposal does not address this risk: a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process.
- Nobody can show whether access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- The decision has no named owner or review point.
What Should You Ask a Consultant?
- What changes for the user if we choose this approach to dependency and supply-chain risk?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process.
- Can you demonstrate that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual?
- Who owns the result, and when will we reconsider it?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
Limit dependencies, review provenance and updates, lock versions appropriately, and maintain a response path for critical advisories. Ask for evidence against the specific risk: a compromised or abandoned dependency reaches production through a trusted update process.