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For cybersecurity professionals, conducting a cyber risk assessment is an essential first step to building an effective cybersecurity program. By identifying potential threats to their organization and understanding the extent of their cyber risk exposures, they can determine the best course of action to mitigate, transfer or manage risks.
It is common practice for businesses to leverage frameworks, like the NIST CSF, to understand the breadth and depth of their cyber risk, evaluate their current controls and highlight residual risk that they need to manage. For many organizations, this approach to cyber risk assessments gives them a strong foundational risk analysis.
So where does the challenge lie? While cyber risk assessments are essential, both to protect businesses and remain compliant, most are lacking in terms of presenting their cyber risk in a business context.
To put it bluntly, the common cyber risk assessment using subjective scoring alone doesn’t deliver the tangible value that business leaders need. Elevating the business benefit of cyber assessments requires the CISO to go beyond regulatory obligations and take further steps to align their cybersecurity program with business goals.
This article explores why a completed cyber risk assessment shouldn’t be the final destination for CISOs looking to measure their organization and support wider business goals. It provides the insights that forward-thinking cybersecurity professionals need to change their organization's approach to assessing and managing cyber risk.
A typical cyber risk assessment starts by documenting the value and impact of a business's assets in a risk register. Businesses then evaluate the risks and assign a qualitative score usually either low/medium/high, red/yellow/green, or 1-5 maturity scores to the following:
The next stage of a cyber risk assessment focuses on how businesses might manage identified risks. Firstly, they break their findings into risk statements like, ‘Key servers are unpatched and are susceptible to ransomware attacks.’ These findings are generally aggregated into a “heat map” to convey severity and urgency.
Then, CISOs aim to prioritize the identified risks and propose mitigation strategies to minimize the exposure of the findings.
Whilst the approach described above is common practice in businesses across the globe, many organizations struggle to connect their cyber risk assessments with tangible business benefits.
Understanding technical exposures is a critical foundation for cyber risk management. However, when they are evaluated against the value that these risk statements bring to the business and the degree to which CISOs can communicate meaningful insights from this process alone, it becomes apparent that a technical-only risk assessment is not a strong enough foundation for an effective cyber risk management strategy in today’s world.
It may provide an adequate starting point for tactical technology improvements, but business-aligned CISOs looking to demonstrate a real impact within their organization and achieve business success, need to take their analysis and planning a step further.
The key principle CISOs need to embrace to elevate their risk assessments is business relevance.
This needs to permeate through every level of their cybersecurity strategy, from assessing risk to prioritization, mitigation and management of cyber risks. Here is how to bridge the gap between tactical cyber risk assessments and effective business alignment.
Business leaders think in terms of dollars, pounds and euros. The aspects of the business that grab their attention most are the ones that promise to either make them money or save them money.
The typical process of evaluating risk based on a qualitative low, medium, or high label doesn’t do this effectively. It lacks accuracy and specificity. Do all high-risk threats present the same business risk potential? Almost certainly not.
As well as not presenting the full picture, this simplified classification isn’t compelling for business leaders. Communicating that a particular threat is a ‘red’ risk, doesn’t carry the same weight or as highlighting the $20 million loss potential the threat presents.
Assigning a monetary amount to risk directly links the cost to mitigate a risk with the amount of money they have saved in doing so. Investing $2 million to prevent a $20 million loss is a far more attractive proposition, than investing the same $2 million to mitigate a high risk.
X-Analytics allows businesses to simply understand the financial exposure and potential loss associated with specific risks and present this information in the context of how much investment is required to mitigate or minimize the risk. This is the first step CISOs need to take to tie their cyber risk assessment to business ROI.
One of the challenges with a typical cyber risk assessment process is that it facilitates CISOs prioritizing their risk mitigation strategies in a silo, separate from the rest of the business. This often leads to a fragmented approach and lack of engagement from key stakeholders.
The main cause of this is a situation of two extremes. The details of the risks and threats businesses face are often too complex and technical for most business leaders to understand. Whereas, the oversimplified high, medium and low summaries don’t provide enough information for optimal decision-making.
The best decisions are made when leaders operate and communicate in a middle ground.
X-Analytics provides the information you need to enable productive risk-prioritization conversations aligned to what matters to business leaders. It gives CISOs and business leaders the context they need, without the technical jargon. By adopting this approach, CISOs can ensure they are aligning their priorities with the wider business.
For business leaders, cybersecurity is often viewed as a necessary cost to protect their business. They view the best-case scenario as one where they invest the minimal amount possible to effectively protect their business. It’s a game of minimizing losses, without any real wins.
This is where CISOs have the opportunity to change the narrative. By elevating their cyber risk assessments and overlaying the business insights that X-Analytics provides, they can reposition their role and the role of cybersecurity as not only minimizing losses but enabling the business to maximize the wins.
Risk is an accepted part of growing a business. Business leaders are willing to embrace a degree of risk when the return on investment is greater and more appealing than what they stand to lose.
By bringing business leaders into the cybersecurity conversation, communicating in a way they can understand and actively demonstrating the role cybersecurity plays in protecting the business, CISOs can instill the confidence the C-Suite and Board need in their security program to make decisions that grow the business.
Risk assessments are a crucial part of assessing, communicating, and managing a business's cyber risk. But the days are long gone when conducting a cyber risk assessment in isolation and treating it as a box-ticking exercise was an adequate approach.
The data and insights businesses need to be able to make smart business decisions around cybersecurity extend far beyond what can be gained from a standard cyber risk assessment. CISOs can now take their cyber risk assessment and treat it as a starting point. By investing in solutions like X-Analytics to add depth and value to their risk assessment, CISOs and businesses alike are declaring their ambition to go beyond the status quo and unlock real opportunities.
X-Analytics facilitates this shift for cyber security professionals and business leaders. They’re able to access the data and insights they need, in a format that carries business significance. Transitioning cyber risk management from a box-ticking exercise to a strategic business success enablement process starts with X-Analytics.
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