Organizational change is a constant. It’s how businesses reach new heights. Unfortunately, the cyber threat spectrum also constantly changes. The near-continuous emergence of variants to well-known threats, as well as entirely new exploits and attack tactics, should remind organizations that complacency around cybersecurity risk management can lead to serious consequences, even the end of the business itself.
Though it may seem like you’re chasing a target that never seems to slow down enough for you to gain a complete picture, the cybersecurity risk assessment process offers you a way to stabilize the image within your crosshairs.
This process is so well-respected, and so highly-trusted, because when applied correctly, it dramatically reduces both the planning horizon and the level of effort required to navigate your security roadmap. Your roadmap is essential to controlling the impacts of existing cyber threats, updating risk profiles to reflect organizational changes, and avoiding impacts of cyber threats that emerge in the future, so you want it to be easily navigable.
By performing a cybersecurity risk assessment, you gain an excellent baseline reference to benchmark and qualify whether your cybersecurity controls and management capabilities provide the same amount of protection after you implement new business locations, applications or other new ways of doing things. These results similarly inform next steps around variant or newly-emergent cyber threats.
Without a cybersecurity risk assessment, you’re forced to consider everything that’s proposed, or that could happen, from scratch. But with an assessment, both your starting point and waypoints along the journey toward effective cybersecurity risk management are much clearer and easier to discern.
Next steps
Identify vulnerable assets and credible threats: Compress the scope of the cybersecurity risk assessment to include only credible cyber threats, and only those organizational assets vulnerable to them.
Measure and prioritize cybersecurity gaps and business enablers: Maximize business benefits by planning the enterprise security roadmap such that its cadence and sequence mitigate the larger-impact cyber risks first, and that it respects potential future business use cases.
Reference the cybersecurity risk assessment: Use cybersecurity risk assessment results to guide your thinking in response to newly announced business changes and emergent cyber threats. Estimate your future cyber risk profile on the basis of your current one — is what you have sufficient for the future, or do you need reinforcement?
Sustain the cybersecurity risk assessment: Periodically renew the cybersecurity risk assessment to confirm it’s still based on relevant assets and threats, and update its methodology and risk-scoring routines to pace improvements advanced by trusted sources such as NIST.