Commodities are often given short shrift in discussions about supply-chain risk management. Dave Brown, vice president of supply chain and agricultural sales in North America for Ingredion Inc., helps to correct the oversight.

China's e-commerce market continues to skyrocket with estimates of 2012 B2C sales likely to top $107bn. However, this growth has placed pressure on the logistics infrastructure resulting in delivery issues. Not only is delivery a problem, but according to 360Buy, one of the largest Chinese e-commerce providers, "E-commerce is developing quickly but fulfillment and logistics are the key bottlenecks."

The use of highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms"”known as cloud computing"”is growing rapidly. Adopters are driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money. Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds. But as attractive as cloud environments can be, they also come with new types of risks.