The tremendous advances in technology have created a highly connected world. These days, data breaches are a common occurrence. We’ve seen it in the headlines and used to think, “oh, that will never happen to me.” But as we all know – it can and probably will. Regardless of your industry or size, cybersecurity has become, or is becoming, a necessity for your company. Yet, it feels like a chore to keep bad actors away from your business data and your customer’s data. Here’s why you need a risk assessment:
The Department of Homeland Security states that identifying critical assets and associated impacts from cyber threats are critical to understanding your company’s specific risk exposure – whether financial, competitive, reputational or regulatory. A risk assessments results are a key input to identifying and prioritizing specific protective measures, allocating resources, informing long-term investments and developing policies and strategies to manage your cyber risks to an acceptable level.
The primary purpose of a risk assessment is to inform decision-makers and support proper risk responses. In other words, risk assessment provides an executive summary to help your company make informed decisions about security.
A risk assessment identifies:
- What is important to your company
- How a hacker could gain access to your critical data
- What could happen if your data fell into the wrong hands
- How big of a target you have on your back
It’s important to note that your industry may be already subjected to a mandatory cybersecurity assessment. But if not, there are many ways to accomplish one. You can either perform your own comprehensive analysis or hire a company that can guide you through the process.
The Reasons for a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment
There are many benefits to performing a cybersecurity risk assessment. But, to spare your time, I will only list a few.
Business Continuity
A data breach has huge financial and reputational impact to your business. For instance, a data breach can cause your company to lose the secrets to your success. In addition, you could experience significant loss due to application down time. Result: Losing money, customers and business.
Regulatory Compliance
A security assessment helps address your compliance concerns. If your customer’s data is vulnerable than you have failed to comply with regulations (PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA). These regulations are serious, and lack of compliance equals hefty fines.
Power of Knowledge
By identifying potential threats and vulnerabilities you can work on mitigating them. Having this knowledge gives you the power to prevent and reduce security incidents. Above all, this saves your business the long-term costs of security incidents.
What Type of Security Assessments are Available?
Enterprise Risk Assessment
An *Enterprise Risk Assessment, aligns your organizations key personnel to identify threats, risks and impacts to your overall mission and objectives.
- Identify key risks hindering achieving your main business objectives
- Establish a communication process to report risk to executives
- Strategic planning and decision making through formalizing risk response
- Achieve legal compliance, creating value from your investments.
Learn more about achieving compliance by downloading our compliance guide.
Cybersecurity Maturity Risk Assessment
A *Cybersecurity Maturity Risk Assessment strengthens your security program efforts by focusing on specific controls that protect critical assets, infrastructure, applications, and data by assessing your organization’s defensive posture.
- Understand how you are managing your risks, including third-party risk.
- Create a more effective risk management activity
- Ensure efficient development and optimization of your cyber program
- Maximize your ROI in cybersecurity.
Third-Party Risk Management Assessment
Plan, develop and manage your third-party risks with a TPRM Assessment. This type of assessment will significantly reduce your exposure to high-risk relationships.
- Identify gaps and provide recommendations for improvements
- Build or refine TPRM programs
- Discover and classify third-party relationships based on risk
- Determine if you’re meeting current regulations
Penetration Testing
A penetration test is a special (in-depth) kind of vulnerability assessments. It shows whether your security posture is enough or not. You can learn more about a pen test vs. risk assessment here. Or, download this checklist to help your company pick a vendor you can trust.
So why do you need a risk assessment?
Every company needs risk assessment to identify weaknesses, prioritize protective measures and effectively allocate resources to ensure success and navigate the complexity of rapidly evolving landscapes. If you are ready to improve your cybersecurity, Stealth-ISS can conduct risk assessment that can help you avoid massive data breaches caused by some of the newest and most subtle exploits.
