It is essential to understand the various risks associated with your business and take proactive measures to mitigate them A business’s operation automatically exposes its owners to a predetermined amount of inevitable risk. The only thing that requires a solution is how strategically threats will play their cards; therefore, we’ll focus on that. It is important for security leaders to remember that their company will not suffer the same degree of risk from all threats; some may have a greater impact than others, and so it is important to prioritize the risks and put the resources into protecting against the ones with the greatest potential impact.
For your organization to take the proper risks at the appropriate times, the priorities of your company and the risk tolerance of its leadership team need to be in sync with one another. Professionals who work in security or compliance need to have a solid understanding of both concepts in order to construct a risk management program that is helpful to the organization and strikes the essential balance. This can only be accomplished by having a firm grip on both principles.
It is physically impossible for a company’s risk management programs to continuously and completely align with each and every one of the company’s business goals. This is something that should not come as a surprise to anybody. But risk management should be constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of the organization in order to ensure that it remains both effective and relevant.
To illustrate this, let’s take one example of a new marketing tool that is not very well known but has the potential to reach many buyers and the resulting increase in sales by more than 50 percent but does not have all of the security precautions, no data protection, and very little compliance regulation. So in this case, should businesses invest in the less secure tool and risk their data, privacy, and security? Is there a prospect of getting anything worthwhile out of taking such a significant risk? To come to a decision, we must have a risk management program that can decide whether to take a risk or not.
Another way that risk management may assist businesses in accomplishing their objectives is by accelerating the organization’s maturity level. This is a significant component of running an efficient risk management operation. As a key component of managing cyber risk, the process of identifying all pertinent components of cyber risk and assessing risk exposure in terms of its potential effect on a company is required. In addition to this, it falls under the umbrella of enterprise risk management as a subset.
In other words, the management of cyber risk involves broader business and financial issues, such as the loss of customer trust or compliance penalties, rather than viewing cybersecurity as merely a technology issue, such as ransomware causing IT staff to have to restore data. This is in contrast to the traditional approach, which views cybersecurity as merely a technology issue. In order to have a successful strategy for managing cyber risk, one of the most important components is to make use of data to guide risk reduction. By utilizing the data available, organizations can identify and assess potential risks, create a strategy for addressing them, and implement preventative measures to ensure ongoing security.
Businesses are able to estimate the amount of money that may be lost as a result of a variety of cyberattacks and investigate the ways in which alternative approaches to cybersecurity may reduce these losses when they make use of a technique called cyber risk quantification. This technique was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Through cyber risk quantification, organizations can develop a more accurate assessment of the risks they face, allowing them to better understand the potential costs and benefits associated with various approaches to managing cyber risk.
If the necessary technology is not used, it may be difficult to conduct an evaluation of the cyber risk that is associated with financial transactions as well as to manage the cyber risk in its entirety.
To properly manage cyber risk, it is necessary to have current knowledge of the whole of the cyber world. Therefore, it is important to utilize technologies such as cyber risk quantification in order to gain an understanding of the cyber landscape and the associated risks.
This encompasses the whole of the cyber environment, including but not limited to cyber threats, legislation, governance rules, and more. Furthermore, it is important to use these technologies to develop an understanding of the current level of cyber risk that exists within the organization and its environment.
Every organization needs to invest in a risk management platform, considering it is a mandatory tool for every CISO to ensure all risks are properly visible and have mitigation against them. In order to successfully strengthen the security of the digital organization without burdening it with an excessive number of technical devices and restricting processes, it is essential that the solution be proportionate to the risk of an attack and the size of the possible damage.
To put it another way, we should move away from the idea that safety can be defined in absolute terms and toward the idea that risk can be defined in relative terms. Another significant advantage of risk is that it can be analyzed in terms of the probability of its occurrence and its impact on the company.
Because of this, there is no longer a need to concentrate only on the technical aspects of cybersecurity, which is regrettably the case much too often. Instead, businesses should be encouraged to think about how the risk of an attack can be managed and minimized through a combination of preventive measures and corrective actions.
Information technology security is no longer a mysterious and costly constraint if risks are taken into consideration; rather, it becomes an objective management feature. It is possible to have a better grasp of the potential repercussions on the organization by using a risk-based approach, which makes it feasible to do so. Therefore, the stakes become apparent to everyone, measurable, and comparable, allowing the organization to create clear aims and rules and evaluate the success that has been achieved in relation to the investments that have been made. This will enable the organization to make well-informed decisions, accurately prioritize investments, and ensure that all possible security measures have been considered.
It is no longer possible for businesses to depend on a single point-in-time snapshot evaluation of the security threats posed to the digital assets of their organization since these businesses are continually under the threat of a security breach from all directions. A continuous security program that actively identifies and reduces security risks in a company’s ever-expanding world of network-connected assets is something that every business must be able to enable as a consequence of the continually shifting nature of the security threat environment. Furthermore, this program must be able to automatically adapt as the threat environment changes to ensure that a business can confidently assess, prioritize, and protect its digital assets.
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and the Executive Management Team need to come to an agreement on the Security Risk Management program and implement it as a top priority. This will enable the CISO to more effectively, efficiently, and continuously identify security risks to the organization, all while collaborating with the IT department to plan, prioritize, and put into action risk-reducing solutions, which will result in a continuous cycle of securing your network-connected digital assets. These solutions must be regularly evaluated and updated to ensure that the program remains effective at managing risk.
To overcome all data center physical and logical security, all businesses that offer data center services and have numerous client data housed and controlled by data center service providers must develop a zero-trust architecture.
Organizations can create and maintain a reliable digital infrastructure with the help of Fulcrum’s Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering. Our clients gain from our comprehensive infrastructure support, qualified professionals providing round-the-clock service, and strong OEM technology alliances.
Author: Vaibhav Tare is a CISO & Head of Cloud Infrastructure at Fulcrum Digital with over 27 years of cybersecurity, cloud, enterprise data center infrastructure experience. In his role, he advises customers, partners, ISVs, and OEMs on best practices for developing cybersecurity, data center and cloud management strategies and architecting and designing data center modernization blueprints with software defined infrastructure projects.
