What Happened
Only 55% of UK businesses actively monitor cyber and technology risks across their supply chains, according to research by audit, tax and consulting firm RSM UK. The finding comes from RSM UK’s Supply Chain Integrity Survey, reported by Logistics Business on 6 August 2026. The same survey found that just 39% of businesses describe themselves as very confident in their ability to withstand an incident. Logistics Business does not state the sample size, the sectors covered or the survey period in the material available.
Published: Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:50:20 +0000 Source: Logistics Business
Where a Cyber Outage Stops Freight Moving
Freight is where a supply chain cyber incident becomes visible fastest. When a forwarder, a haulier or a port community system goes offline, bookings stop, customs declarations queue and containers sit. The operational consequence is measured in days of dwell, demurrage and missed vessel or flight departures. The RSM UK figure of 55% matters because the businesses not monitoring cyber risk across their suppliers are the ones least likely to know which of their vendors sits on the critical path for a delivery.
The survey point is about visibility rather than about defences. Monitoring means knowing which suppliers hold your data, which systems you depend on and how you would be told if one of them failed. In international freight forwarding that chain is long: a booking touches a carrier, a terminal, a customs broker, a haulier and often a warehouse management system, each with its own access controls. RSM UK’s finding is that a large minority of UK businesses do not track that exposure at all.
The practical step for a UK importer or exporter is a short dependency list. Name the parties who can stop your goods moving: your forwarder, your customs agent, the carrier, the terminal and any system that files your declarations to CDS. For each one, record the manual fallback and the contact who confirms an outage. A CDS filing agent that cannot submit electronically is a supply chain problem you feel at the port, not an IT problem, and postponed VAT accounting does not help if the declaration itself cannot be lodged.
Key Takeaway
Cyber exposure sits in your supply chain whether or not you monitor it, and RSM UK found only 55% of UK businesses do. The freight consequence is simple: if a party in your booking chain goes down, your cargo stops. Write down who those parties are and what the manual fallback is.
Market Impact
Insurance and contract terms are where this shows up first. Buyers with concentrated supplier exposure and no monitoring cannot evidence due diligence when an incident happens, which affects both claims and customer contracts that carry service commitments. RSM UK’s 39% confidence figure suggests most UK businesses would not describe themselves as resilient today. For importers, the exposure is concentrated at the declaration and release stage, where a single unavailable system holds goods at a port or airport regardless of how the freight itself was moved.
Expect procurement questionnaires to get longer. Where a large importer or retailer is monitoring supplier cyber risk, that requirement passes down to forwarders, hauliers and warehouse operators as a condition of tendering. Smaller exporters that cannot answer questions about access controls, incident notification times and data handling will find themselves screened out of tenders they would previously have won. The document to prepare now is a plain statement of which systems you depend on, who holds your data, and how quickly you notify a customer when something fails.
