The best way to secure from cyberattacks is to prevent them before. Security leaders must have effective cybersecurity risk management systems to resist attacks.
Organizations need a robust defensive system to minimize risk levels of incidents and failing compliance checks. It’s necessary because organizations are always at risk from debilitating and unexpected cyber-attacks. In such cases, a cybersecurity risk management plan should always be ready for implementing.
Intense cyberattacks occur due to technology skills and resource gaps. Nevertheless, organizations can cover these gaps by investing in relevant tools gradually. But, even if there are insufficient resources to combat cyber-attacks, the companies should use the existing resources to keep robust risk management systems ready. So, organizations must build risk assessment plans with real-time problem-solving techniques to prevent cybersecurity risks.
Why Does Cybersecurity Risk Management Matter?
Every modern digital business needs to have strong cyber risk management plans, primarily operating in hybrid and remote setups to support the security and compliance of operations. The plans will help to focus and respond to an organization’s specific cybersecurity threats. Putting this kind of best practice in place will ensure the highly impactful risks are addressed first. However, they need to be maintained consistently to handle other unexpected risks falling in the future.
Furthermore, creating a risk management plan increases awareness of cyber threats across the organization.
Security teams must develop robust, effective, real-time preventive strategies to mitigate attacks and risks. The approach required for it includes analytics, predictive, logical, algorithms, calculations, and monitoring.
Having a preventive strategy can:
- Reduce operational costs
- Protect core business assets and revenue
- Improve organizational reputation
According to Gartner’s findings in Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Security and Risk Management Spending to Exceed $150 Billion in 2021, global expenditure on information security and risk management technology and services grew at 12.4% in 2021. Cybersecurity was the top priority for CISOs during the year, with 61% of the 2,000 + CIOs surveyed about increasing investment in cyber security risk management in 2022.
Also Read: Tips to Safeguard Business from Ransomware Attacks
How to Lead Cyber Risk Management – Three Easy Steps
A cybersecurity risk assessment process can be segmented into different parts. However, focusing on these steps will help build a real-time risk management framework.
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Determine the Scope of Cybersecurity Threats & Risk Management
Risk assessment must begin after deciding the scope required for business protection. It could be for cloud networks, servers, software, websites, and applications, or for the entire business operations, including hardware systems.
The motive of the assessment is to keep track of all vulnerable business operations prone to severe attacks. It is vital that all stakeholders equally support assessment activities linked with the scope of mitigating cyber risks, as their inputs may help create more precise security strategies. Their information can be essential to understanding what assets and processes are of utmost importance and require continuous monitoring of threat attacks, identifying risks, assessing impacts, and predicting different levels of risks.
Such resource-intensive exercises are crucial for businesses to practice every short interval after previous management exercises. Stakeholders should be familiar with the terminology used in risk assessment projects, to understand how the security systems are framed and implemented going forward.
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Identify Vulnerable Assets
Identify and create an inventory of all vulnerable hardware and software assets under threats. As mentioned above, identifying assets, such as cloud networks, servers, software, websites, applications, and hardware systems, also require continuous monitoring for risk factors.
While identifying the vulnerable gaps in these assets, it’s important to establish a security firewall, to visualize the interconnectivity and communication paths between assets and processes and keep a check at entry points into the network. These can help identify threats quickly and faster.
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Determine & Prioritize Cyber Security Risks
Each risk scenario can be easily tracked and classified using a risk matrix. If any risk is of a SQL injection attack, then it is categorized as “Likely,” “Highly Likely,” or “Very High.”
Any cyber risk scenario above the tolerance level should be prioritized for assessment and management. There are two ways to do this. First, if the risk is less likely to hit, then security teams can discontinue assessing it. Second, deploy security controls to reduce the impact of cyber threats.
Risk management needs to be done on set dates and days. Progress and completion reports should be presented to monitor the efficacy of the risk management system. This way, security teams can determine and prioritize cyber security risks and work diligently to mitigate them faster.
Also Read: New ATM Malware dubbed “FiXS” Erupts
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Focus on Preventative Measures
While developing an effective and real-time risk management strategy, the third stage focuses on preventive measures mitigating cyber security threats and risks. Implementing two-factor and multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the best way to build a robust security framework. These authentications help in effective incident identification, reporting, and recovery.
Using this process, security teams can frequently improve the effectiveness of cybersecurity tools and software updates. They need to carefully monitor issues and predict unidentified risks from new tools. Lastly, well-maintained risk plans should be updated as new threats and vulnerabilities emerge daily across the cyber ecosystem.
A cybersecurity risk assessment covers more cyber threat because of new technologies, so organizations should keep risk management resources standby for future security. this process is continuous since as new cyber threats come up, organizations are in a better position to identify and mitigate them.
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