ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways that the organization can bring order to the disorderly world of global information and communication technology product supply chains with a process called sustainment. It presents the importance of stable control baselines in maintaining supply chain integrity. The chapter provides the role of long-term sustainment in supply chain risk management processes. The supply chain oversight agent may lack the immediate resources to address the matter or the repair itself would be infeasible for business, technical, or operational reasons such as the unwillingness to take down a critical system. The individual compliance audits provide complete and fully documented assurance of the individual state of each component within the product supply chain tree. The continuing assurance of trust up and down the supply chain involves formal organizational agreements to include risk analysis and response management that coordinate and sustain operational assurance.
