The purpose of a cybersecurity risk assessment is to identify areas that may threaten organization’s operations and its reputation. The goal of a risk assessment is to improve overall cyber defense posture, protect your data, and minimize damage from threats.
What is the Purpose of a Risk Assessment?
In order to improve your organization’s cybersecurity posture, you can’t fully determine what to protect and how if you don’t know what your most vulnerable assets and the risks they face are. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, risk assessments are foundational to an organization’s overall risk management efforts. The NIST CSF five functions represent the five primary pillars for a successful and holistic cybersecurity program. They aid organizations in easily expressing their management of cybersecurity risk at a high level and enabling risk management decisions. The five functions included in the Framework Core are:
- Identify
- Protect
- Detect
- Respond
- Recover
Information gathered from a risk assessment informs you of your organization’s long-term cybersecurity strategy and day-to-day vulnerability remediation.
What Does an Assessment Include?
A risk assessment should cover:
- Digital threats: Unauthorized access to your IT environment
- Technical failures: effectively and efficiently addressing hardware or software failures
- Physical threats: minimizing the effects of natural disasters and preventing unauthorized access to individuals that can damage servers and network devices
Assessments and Regulatory Requirements
Depending on an organization’s industry-specific services, an assessment may be a legal or regulatory requirement. Carrying out a successful risk assessment may accomplish a critical step in validating compliance.
Benefits of a Risk Assessment
Identify Vulnerabilities
While organizations may not be aware of threats or risks, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. A risk assessment is designed to provide valuable insight and data into an organization’s security posture and navigate any potential risks or blind spots so that the necessary measures are taken to address them before it’s too late.
Ensure Data is Safe and Compliant
One of the biggest challenges organizations face is keeping sensitive data private and out of the hands of threat actors. With a risk assessment, organizations can ensure they have the proper security controls and processes in place and they remain up-to-date with all compliance standards to protect confidential data.
Understand Your Ability to Address a Security Threat
Cybercriminals, while malicious, are not the only instigators of risk. Organizations must consider non-malicious threats including national disasters, and employee negligence. A risk assessment will be able to identify vulnerabilities where you may not have thought to look.
Gain Insight from a Cybersecurity Expert
The assessment is only valuable if you know what steps to take after completion. Working with a dedicated cybersecurity risk expert will be a valuable aspect of the assessment. As a third-party observer, a cyber risk assessor has the ability to catch gaps that may have been overlooked internally, and can walk you through your assessment to ensure you understand your environment and what needs to be done to address any vulnerabilities going forward.
Identify Vulnerabilities, threats, and Risks within Your Environment with Kyber Security
Are you confident that your network is 100% secure? It is critical to identify vulnerabilities, risks and threats within your environment before a bad threat actor does. We will help you achieve this by assessing and remediating security gaps to improve your security posture.
