**2. Globalization**

Globalization is linking people and things at a faster pace than ever before. With global markets, supply chains have become more intricate, uncertain, and unpredictable. Therefore, globalization presents challenging problems to assuring the integrity of components used to build trustworthy information systems and networks. Critical information systems should be composed of parts that are trusted to do only that which is expected or specified and to do so reliably and dependably. Global supply chains are vulnerable to questions of unknown product or service provenance, which subsequently leads to questionable trustworthiness of the supplied items and the suppliers in the supply chain.

Both globalization and outsourcing are creating longer supply chains. Outsourcing creates a greater dependency on outsiders – procuring ever-more-complex and more critical products from external strategic suppliers instead of developing products in-house (Bolgar, 2010). Outsourcing projects can provide a number of benefits, including cost savings, increased productivity, improved schedule performance, and higher quality of work (Kliem, 2004). However, extended supply chains greatly increase the complexity of the supply network and decrease the visibility of risks. Nevertheless, globalization provides an opportunity to increase the security of mission critical information systems. The global marketplace can be leveraged to propagate better information assurance techniques and security practices in designing and building trusted information systems.
