Every organization knows it is at risk of a cyberattack, yet too many don’t know where their vulnerabilities are. However, these vulnerabilities can help you identify the likelihood and impact of a cyber incident.
Knowing how to identify the areas of risk in your systems is essential for overall cybersecurity maturity. Moreover, most governmental and industry compliance regulations require you to conduct regular risk assessments. Since nearly every company must meet at least one regulatory compliance requirement, knowing the basics will help you build a successful security risk assessment framework.
A security risk assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of your IT system’s security posture. Moreover, a security risk assessment helps you determine the level of risk in your IT infrastructure by identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing issues. It then recommends security tools, controls, and actions to mitigate the risks it finds.
Digging deeper, you can also opt for a vulnerability assessment to complement your security risk assessment. Vulnerability assessments are a more focused and technical examination that specifically searches for vulnerabilities within your organization’s systems, applications, and network infrastructure.
The purpose of a security risk assessment is to see your entire network architecture through the eyes of a threat actor and anticipate where potential attacks are most likely to be launched. Knowing where and how a cybercriminal can enter your network will enable you to accurately allocate cybersecurity resources and maintain vigilance.
There are different types of security risk assessments that a company can conduct. They include:
A risk assessment is not the same as risk management; risk assessments are conducted periodically and evaluate your systems to find weaknesses. Recommendations for how often to conduct a risk assessment fall between six months and two years depending on regulation requirements. However, significant changes in your environment, such as the introduction of new technologies or major business process changes, may require a more urgent or immediate reassessment to ensure that your security posture remains up-to-date and effective.
On the other hand, risk management is the ongoing process of identifying and mitigating issues. It involves the continuous monitoring of risks, implementing controls, and making adjustments to your security posture as needed to address evolving threats and changes in your organization’s environment.
The simple answer is every company, especially those who handle any type of personally identifiable information (PII). Conducting regular audits of your infrastructure should be part of an organization’s regular best security practices.
Depending on the types of compliance your organization is required to follow, risk assessments are required and will guard against large fines and penalties should you face a data breach or other cyber incident. Because guidelines are always evolving, it is crucial for organizations to stay current. Below is a short list of links for compliances that require a security risk assessment:
Along with regulatory compliance standards, organizations wishing to purchase cyber insurance may be required to conduct an assessment before approval. As the cyber insurance loss ratio climbs, insurers are stepping up their efforts to measure your risk to determine your insurability and premiums.
The risk assessment will usually be conducted by a third-party security assessor. In some cases, however, you may have an in-house team with the skill set and system knowledge to perform the assessment. No matter who handles the evaluation, organizational transparency is necessary to ensure nothing is missed and that the assessment meets all required policy standards.
Because the overall goal is to gain insight into anything that could create risk, the security assessor will do a deep dive into one or more of the following areas:
Although you will have input into the type of assessment you’d like, such as a data security assessment or insider threat evaluation, the assessor is the one who takes the lead. They will determine the assessment scope—which could look at your organization as a whole or, more likely, a single business department or process.
Once that is determined, the assessor will begin the identification process to uncover your most sensitive and valuable corporate assets. After that, they can identify potential threats to these assets and discover how a threat actor could launch an attack against them. Knowing this, the assessor will analyze the different threat scenarios and the impact of an attack. Consequently, they are able to then prioritize risk levels coordinating with the type of threat factor.
With a determined risk outlook, the risk assessor will then put together a mitigation strategy to meet your agreed-upon risk tolerance level. Tools and processes needed to meet this strategy will be recommended for you to implement within a pre-determined time frame.
Compliance requirements are a reason for any company to evaluate their risk levels. But considering the damage a cyber incident can do to an organization, through reputational impact, financial losses, and customer defection, conducting a risk analysis is simply a smart policy. Determining risk levels and identifying vulnerabilities and security threats before they cause harm will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.
An understated benefit of conducting a risk assessment is the emphasis on your policies and processes. Many organizations will devise an incident response plan, but once it is written, it is never looked at again until it is needed.
By focusing an audit on policies, you will be able to see how effective—or how out of date your processes are, what’s missing, and how to set up regular test runs to ensure your incident response is seamless when it is put into action. The assessment will also determine how effective workforce policies, like offboarding and security awareness training, actually are for your company.
Regular assessments will make sure that your most sensitive data is well protected, encrypted, and stored in a secure manner across all devices and systems.
And finally, regular assessments will help your organization create a budget that works best for your actual needs, by providing directions on where you need to build up your security systems and what tools are no longer useful.
Compliance regulations and insurability are the biggest push for security risk assessments, but every organization should consider regular risk evaluations. Threats and vulnerabilities are always out there. Attackers know where you will be most vulnerable. The best way to stop their attack is to have better insight into your vulnerabilities than the threat actors do.
We understand that effective cybersecurity is more than just a checklist; it’s a comprehensive and ongoing commitment to safeguarding your organization. As your trusted partner, we offer a unique approach to cybersecurity strategy—one that begins at the foundation of your IT infrastructure.
Whether you’d like to discuss your current IT setup or pursue cybersecurity strategy and support, we’re here to help you every step of the way—let’s talk.
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