Cloud Offers Alternatives To Firewall To Protect Your IT Clients Supply Chain

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Traditionally, organizations have been trained to believe global trade solutions can only remain safe and in compliance if they are securely encased behind a corporate firewall. As an Aberdeen Group report shows, however, this isn’t necessarily the case.

In the new report, “Organizational Intelligence: Cloud-Based Global Trade Solutions Replace the Firewall.” Researchers found that agile organizations interested in facilitating end-to-end supply chain visibility and organizational intelligence are implementing cloud-based, global trade solutions that are secure and allow users to embed balanced metrics at the executive level and foster organizational intelligence.

Recent research suggests there is a growing preoccupation with collaboration, global trade management (GTM), and global trade compliance (GTC) with suppliers and trading partners.  One key element is embedding risk and global trade metrics into the events/cost data, which in turn fosters a culture of operational readiness and organizational intelligence.

Among the findings of the report is the fact that 77 percent of leading automated companies embed supply chain metrics for risk and global trade into their top management goals and compensation. 

The study also found that automation leaders are 1.65 times more likely to “consolidate or redesign sourcing geographies across multitier points,” and 1.69 times more likely to outsource, optimize, and manage logistics services providers.  Leaders are also 1.54 times as likely to cite compliance shared and centralized at the enterprise.

The report emphasizes the importance of harnessing the Big Data collected at the shipment, customer, and event levels and convert it into actionable intelligence. The leaders are now “using this intelligence to perform cost-to-serve analysis and segmentation, or to calculate landed cost advantages under trade and transport lane restructuring.”