What Stateful Processing Actually Is
December 9, 2025
The weak link isn't your firewall. It's the connections between your systems and your partners. The NCSC's 2025 threat report confirms what we see in the field.
Three things that matter for retail and logistics operators
- 5,995 incidents reported in 2024/25. 331 required specialist support. Direct financial losses reached $26.9m. The actual cost is higher when you factor in recovery time, operational disruption, and reputation.
- Attackers exploit the obvious. Unpatched systems, weak credentials, and misconfigured cloud services are the most common entry points. Public-facing apps and partner connections are prime targets.
- Supply-chain exposure creates blind spots. Vendor compromises, third-party breaches, and hidden dependencies (like that integration you set up three years ago and forgot about) give attackers stepping stones into your environment. Your EDI mandates and system integrations are part of your attack surface.
What to do
- Treat your integration layer as mission-critical infrastructure that needs securing, not just connectivity to maintain.
- Assume attacks will arrive through partner credentials, vendor compromises, or misconfigured APIs. Test whether you'd detect if a supplier's email got compromised tomorrow.
- Pressure-test your supply chain. Can you identify every system that touches customer data? Do you know which vendors have access to what?
How Flow addresses this
This is why Flow's Assure360 managed integration model differs: we take operational responsibility for the integration layer that connects your systems to partners. We treat your integrations as attack surface that needs active monitoring and hardening. EDI mandates from major retailers, API connections to warehouse systems, supplier data feeds. These are the flows where compromised credentials or vendor breaches create real business impact. Our specialists manage these connections with the same rigour you'd expect for production infrastructure, because that's what they are.
Read the full report
Statistics and findings above are from the National Cyber Security Centre's Cyber Threat Report 2025.
