Cyber Risk Management

Start with the explosion of cloud services and third-party vendors contacting sensitive data. A Ponemon Institute study estimates the average company shares confidential information with 583 third parties. IT security teams have their hands full, managing complex infrastructures full of vendor risk.

Cyber Risk Management

It starts with building knowledge of the risk management process, identifying the critical action steps, and understanding the essential capabilities your organization will need to effectively conduct assessments and manage risk.

When it comes to managing risk, organizations generally follow a four-step process beginning with identifying risk. Next, risk is assessed based on the likelihood of threats exploiting vulnerabilities and the potential impact. Risks are prioritized, with organizations choosing from a variety of mitigation strategies. The fourth step, monitoring, is structured to risk response and controls current despite a continually shifting environment.

Consequences can best be defined as the adverse results that occur when threats exploit vulnerabilities. Their impact measures the severity of consequences, and your organization will need to estimate such costs when attempting to assess risk. Keep in mind that these costs usually come from lost or destroyed information, which can be a significant business setback for any organization.

Risk assessments provide an excellent opportunity to emphasize the importance of security across your organization. Assessing risk allows your team to practice communication and cooperation to play a critical role in future risk management.

Identifying and assessing risk is just the beginning. What is your organization going to do about the risk you find? What will your mitigation response be for managing risk? How will you manage residual risk? History tells us the most successful risk management teams have a well-thought plan in place to guide their risk response strategy.

Smart organizations know to base their risk response measures and risk management posture on real data. They prioritize risks as well as mitigation solutions using concrete data from real-world applications.

Speaking of damage costs, it has become increasingly necessary for organizations to estimate these in relation to cybersecurity risk accurately. When estimating damage costs of cybersecurity risk, you need to keep three types of expenses in mind. Operational costs involve lost time or resources and are easy to calculate. Fiscal costs can include fines for non-compliance or lost income when existing clients defect or new opportunities are lost. The hardest to calculate is the reputational cost associated with breaches that violate customer privacy and trust.

Your organization has identified, assessed, and mitigated the risks in your environment. In a perfect world, that would be enough. But as we know, change is a constant, and your team will need to monitor environments to ensure internal controls maintain alignment with IT risk.

Other than NIST SP 800-53, there are several additional cybersecurity compliance standards/frameworks that contain best practices and requirements for managing cyber risk. Below are the most well-recognized frameworks:

The NIST Risk Management Framework provides a process that integrates security, privacy, and cyber supply-chain risk management activities into the system development life cycle. The RFM approach can be applied to new and legacy systems, any type of system or technology (e.g., IoT, control systems), and within any type of organization regardless of size or sector. The key steps laid out in the framework include the following:

Risk management is a continual process that should always include re-assessment, new testing, and ongoing mitigation. Keep in mind, internal compliance and audit teams can play a significant role in controlling IT risk moving forward. Below are nine ways they can help:

Assessing risk has never been easy, and thanks to COVID-19 and the economic recession, conducting IT risk assessments is more challenging than ever. What capabilities will your team need to navigate these current challenges?

As teams across the enterprise participate in risk assessment and mitigation phases, they will need the tools for effective communication. These tools should provide a clear conversation record for team members in different locations, time zones, or countries.

Be sure your team takes full advantage of third-party risk management frameworks like NIST Special Publication 800-30 to guide risk assessment and management. These third-party frameworks can help audit teams perform a swifter, more precise gap analysis between compliance requirements and current operations.

Managing risk across the enterprise is harder than ever today. Modern security landscapes change frequently, and the explosion of third-party vendors, evolving technologies, and a continually expanding mine-field of regulations challenge organizations. The COVID-19 pandemic and recession have further raised the bar for security and compliance teams by creating more responsibility while diminishing resources.

Mark Knowles is a freelance content marketing writer specializing in articles, e-books, and whitepapers on cybersecurity, automation, and artificial intelligence. Mark has experience creating fresh content, engaging audiences, and establishing thought leadership for many top tech companies. He is based in the sunny state of Arizona but enjoys traveling the world and writing remotely.

Risk management is a key requirement of many information security standards and frameworks, and laws such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and NIS Regulations (Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018).

Our risk assessment consultancy service includes guidance and advice on developing suitable methods for managing risks in line with the international standard for information security risk management, ISO 27005.

IT Governance specialises in providing best-practice action plans, consultancy services, risk assessment, risk management and compliance solutions, focusing on cyber security, cyber resilience, data protection and business continuity.

In an increasingly punitive and privacy-focused business environment, we are committed to helping organisations protect themselves and their customers from the perpetually evolving range of cyber threats. Our deep industry expertise and pragmatic approach help our clients improve their defences and make critical strategic decisions that benefit the entire business.

Cybersecurity risk management is a strategic approach to prioritizing threats. Organizations implement cybersecurity risk management in order to ensure the most critical threats are handled in a timely manner. This approach helps identify, analyze, evaluate, and address threats based on the potential impact each threat poses.

A risk management strategy acknowledges that organizations cannot entirely eliminate all system vulnerabilities or block all cyber attacks. Establishing a cybersecurity risk management initiative helps organizations attend first to the most critical flaws, threat trends, and attacks.

It involves the identification of cyber attacks that may negatively impact these IT assets. The organization is required to determine the likelihood of the occurrence of these attacks, and define the impact each attack may incur.

There are several cyber risk management frameworks, each of which provides standards organizations can use to identify and mitigate risks. Senior management and security leaders use these frameworks to assess and improve the security posture of the organization.

A cyber risk management framework can help organizations effectively assess, mitigate, and monitor risks; and define security processes and procedures to address them. Here are several commonly used cyber risk management frameworks.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has created the ISO/IEC 270001 in partnership with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The ISO/IEC 270001 cybersecurity framework offers a certifiable set of standards defined to systematically manage risks posed by information systems. Organizations can also use the ISO 31000 standard, which provides guidelines for enterprise risk management.

The Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) framework is defined for the purpose of helping enterprises measure, analyze, and understand information risks. The goal is to guide enterprises through the process of making well-informed decisions when creating cybersecurity best practices.

Fully incorporate your risk-based cybersecurity program into the enterprise risk management framework, which functions as the organizing principle for analyzing and classifying enterprise risks. The framework should not be used as a general guideline, but rather as the organizing principle. By framing cyber risk as a business risk, this approach makes cyber risk management more intelligible to businesses.

Identify the workflows that generate the greatest business value and define their associated risks. It is important to consider the potential impact of crucial workflows because these can also pose a significant risk. For example, payment processes create value but present a business risk, as they are vulnerable to fraud and data leakage.

Make sure the cybersecurity team knows which processes are regarded as valuable for your organization, and define the components (data assets, tools, teams) involved in each process. This allows you to apply the recommended controls. A collaborative approach involving both cybersecurity and business personnel is more effective than the one-sided maturity-based approach.

Determine risk level based on the cost of prevention and value of information to inform your risk management and mitigation procedures. High-level risks should be addressed as soon as possible, while low-level risks can be addressed down the line or accepted as a tolerated risks. If the cost of protecting an asset is higher than its value, the expense is not worthwhile unless the risk may impact your reputation. 041b061a72