What Are the Elements of a Security Risk Assessment?
Following through with consistent security risk assessments ensures your business is prepared for any threats to the security of your company data. With business services that focus on risk assessments, your organization will be able to identify threats and create a remediation strategy. But what are the methodologies for conducting an information security risk assessment? In this blog, we’ll explain the importance of carrying out a risk assessment and break down what security risk assessments actually are.
What Is a Security Risk Assessment?
A security risk assessment evaluates your company's technology and procedures for risks to determine if measures are in place to protect against security threats. These assessments take a holistic approach to keeping your business safe, and key security controls in applications are identified, evaluated, and implemented. Additionally, risk assessments emphasize avoiding application security flaws and vulnerabilities. A security risk assessment examines everything that could be a threat to the company's security or compliance in great detail. In addition to finding flaws, they also show management what areas of staff training are necessary to reduce attack surfaces.
Security risk assessments are in-depth analyses of an entire business, a particular IT project, or business department. The objective of the evaluation is to identify issues and security gaps before the bad guys do. A security assessor will review all elements of your company's systems to discover areas of concern while conducting a security risk assessment. These problems might be as straightforward as a system that permits weak passwords, or they could be more complicated like unsecured business procedures.
The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) mandates security risk assessments as part of a SOC II audit for service businesses, as well as for ISO 27001, HITRUST CSF, and HIPAA compliance.
What Are the 5 Elements of Risk Assessment?
It's crucial to assess how your preventative initiatives have changed your security posture during a risk assessment. For instance, firewalls, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, access restrictions, and advanced authentication procedures can shield high-risk infrastructure from cyber risks. To determine whether these efforts truly secure your IT assets as intended, you should consistently test and evaluate their effectiveness. To do this, there are five elements of security risk assessment you should check off of your data security risk assessment checklist:
1. Monitor
There are actions you can take to passively monitor your network for threats and security vulnerabilities even if risk assessments are regularly conducted. Since a security risk assessment offers a comprehensive, detailed, and accurate picture of vulnerabilities and threats at the time it is conducted, it is crucial to maintain security while in-between assessments. With tools like anti-virus and malware protection, you can consistently monitor any activity that might be concerning. You can also proactively identify malware, Denial of Service assaults, botnets, and man-in-the-middle attacks and prevent them before they cause any harm with correctly set firewalls and threat intelligence systems.
2. Identify
To make sure that all of your risks have been adequately mitigated, a security risk assessment identifies all of your essential assets, weaknesses, and controls in your organization. Your company's important technological assets and the sensitive data those devices produce, store, or transfer may be found through an assessment. Having this knowledge is essential for creating risk management procedures that are suitable for your business.
3. Create Risk Profile
Risk profiles are analyses of the possible hazards associated with particular assets that assist you in determining the danger to your overall risk environment. In addition to lowering overall security standards costs, risk profiles make it simpler to develop independent security procedures for physical or digital information assets. Your organization's security risk profile can then serve as the basis for decisions regarding funding and resource allocation for cybersecurity. This comes with the understanding that the list of risks will alter as a result of changes in the threat environment, the use of technology, or the disclosure of vulnerabilities.
4. Develop Mitigation Plan
If you don't use the data from your information security risk assessment to create mitigation strategies, none of the information you acquired will safeguard your stakeholders. Risk assessment reports are used to control the effect of negative occurrences through the use of mitigation methods such IT infrastructure segmentation, backup policies, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans.
5. Protect Assets
An underlying principle of a corporate security program and those involved in asset protection is understanding the nature and scope of security-related risk. Your business will unavoidably experience a cyberattack or data breach at some time given the growing amount of security risks that are being identified every day. Nearly 15 million data records were exposed in 2022, according to Statista. When an unforeseen catastrophe happens, like a natural disaster or a cyberattack, prioritizing your assets can help you identify which ones to preserve the most. It will also help guide you to rescue and restore first, facilitating the recovery of your business activities.
What Are the 8 Steps of Security Risk Assessment?
To implement the elements of monitoring, identifying, creating a risk profile, developing a mitigation plan, and protecting assets, you can take the following steps:
Produce a comprehensive map of potentially vulnerable assets, including every program, user, and data storage container since they all add to your total attack surface.
Identify security threats and vulnerabilities by simulating actual cyberattacks on your systems, assessing your existing level of security preparation against established standards, and learning from the results.
Determine and prioritize risks by assigning a risk score to each vulnerability so you can create remediation strategies and compare the costs and benefits of each threat or vulnerability to your entire remediation budget.
Analyze and develop security controls and determine if they are able to identify risks and weaknesses, prevent them, or neutralize them.
Document results from a risk assessment report to summarize the findings from the different threat and vulnerability assessments in a clear ranking that demonstrates the order of importance of your remediation strategy.
Create a remediation plan to reduce risks, including the key, high-level procedures for every solution. It’s also important to consider the related expenses, such as the cost, length of time needed to develop a solution, and disruption to business operations.
Implement recommendations by assigning the appropriate team to each item in the remediation plan with realistic time frames for completion. There should also be an outline of the actions teams should take to track the success of their remediation activities.
Evaluate effectiveness and repeat the process through ongoing monitoring and optimization like internal audits, risk evaluations, and gap analyses.
Identify Threats and Boost Security with Moser
Our committed IT experts at Moser know how challenging it can be to consistently maintain monitoring and assessment of security risks. For 25 years, Moser has focused on the success of our clients and our knowledgeable IT team members want to help you reach your business goals with your security in mind. Visit our website for more information on our business services.
