New Feature Released for 'Assured Corporate Assessment': 'Basic Measures Questionnaire' Covers Security Surveys for Business Partners

Assured Inc. (Headquarters: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Representative Director and President: Atsushi Omori) announced the release of a new feature, the 'Assured Corporate Assessment Basic Measures Questionnaire' (hereinafter, 'Basic Measures Questionnaire'), for its 'Assured Corporate Assessment' service, which provides security credibility evaluations for business partners. This new feature enables efficient and comprehensive risk management for a diverse range of business partners that constitute a broad supply chain, tailored to their specific business characteristics and risk natures.

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Background

The 'Cybersecurity Strategy*1' approved by the Cabinet in December 2025 stated that 'Given the risk that damage to a single entity or business interruption can have a significant impact on society as a whole, it is necessary to raise the level of effective measures for each of the wide range of entities that could become targets of attack.' With the increasing complexity of supply chains, comprehensive risk management, including business partners, has become an indispensable element.

However, with a large number of business partners to manage, uniformly requiring a high level and specialized security measure evaluation from all of them posed a significant challenge, resulting in excessive workload for both managing and responding parties. Therefore, there was a demand to efficiently promote more effective supply chain risk management by incorporating an appropriate 'risk-based approach' tailored to the magnitude of the risk.

In response, 'Assured Corporate Assessment' introduces the 'Basic Measures Questionnaire' function to quickly visualize the status of a wide range of business partners and achieve 'multi-layered evaluation' according to risk. This aims to balance comprehensive security enhancement with advanced management based on importance.

* National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC): Cybersecurity Strategy (Cabinet Decision)

Overview of 'Assured Corporate Assessment Basic Measures Questionnaire'

The 'Basic Measures Questionnaire' complements the conventional 'Assured Corporate Assessment Security Survey' (hereinafter, 'Security Survey') and is a function to efficiently survey basic security items that a wide range of business partners should minimally comply with. Previously, attempting to uniformly evaluate all a vast number of business partners with differing characteristics and risks often led to excessive burden in some cases and insufficient verification in others, hindering effective management. Fundamentally, in supply chain management, optimizing evaluation through a 'risk-based approach' tailored to the business connection and magnitude of risk with each business partner is essential.

The new 'Basic Measures Questionnaire' function supports the establishment of an efficient and thorough management system by comprehensively understanding the status of business partners' measures and serving as the starting point for risk management.

[ 'Step-up' Evaluation Operation According to Risk ] By utilizing this function, an efficient 'two-pronged' operation tailored to the content and importance of transactions becomes possible.

1st Step: Business partners with low information confidentiality (New function: 'Basic Measures Questionnaire') First, this function is used to comprehensively visualize the status of a wide range of business partners, including those whose status has not been grasped until now. Because the response burden is low, it provides an opportunity for quick overall understanding and basic security enhancement.

2nd Step: Business partners with high information confidentiality (Existing function: 'Security Survey') For business partners deemed to require deeper scrutiny based on questionnaire results, the confidentiality of information handled, transaction value, and other importance factors, the 'Assured Corporate Assessment' security expert team (security consultants and audit experienced personnel) with professional qualifications will assess the risks.

[ Main Features of this Function ]

Design specialized in basic and essential items, supervised by experts The questions are condensed into about 15 effective questions, supervised by our security experts, while referencing indicators such as 'SECURITY ACTION (*1, *2)' promoted by IPA (Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan), the UK's 'Cyber Essentials,' and the US CIS (Center for Internet Security)'s 'CIS Controls.' It is designed to be easy to answer even without specialized knowledge.

Automation of survey, collection, and reminders The entire process from sending questionnaires to reminding non-responders is completed on the system, significantly reducing the management workload for implementing companies.

Proactive improvement promotion through 'Correction Report' After responding to the questionnaire, a report summarizing specific issues and examples of countermeasures will be sent. This supports effective risk reduction beyond just a survey.

Atsushi Omori, Representative Director and President of Assured Inc., Comments

Until now, security management for business partners in the supply chain has been limited to a 'point' evaluation for a few critical hubs that directly handle confidential information. (Truncated)