What is a cyber risk assessment?
A cyber risk assessment is an evaluation of the information assets within an IT environment that might be affected by a cyberattack. These may include data, intellectual property, devices, systems, and hardware. The assessment also analyzes the risk associated with each asset.
Benefits of a risk assessment
By conducting regular cyber risk assessments, security teams can better understand and prioritize the assets that need to be protected based on the severity of risk associated with each. This enables teams to direct optimal resources toward the most severe risks, improving the organization’s security performance and posture.
What's the purpose of a cyber risk assessment?
Identifying & Visualizing risk
As data breaches continue to wreak havoc and grab headlines, organizations are looking for more effective ways to identify and mitigate cyber risk and cyber liability. Traditional cyber risk assessments are time-consuming and limited in the information they provide, providing only a point-in-time snapshot of security performance. To keep pace with the rapid evolution of cybersecurity threats, organizations must be able to assess their security posture on a continuous basis, identifying and detecting unknown risk hiding in their digital ecosystems.
The challenges of assessing cyber risk
Digital ecosystems today are constantly expanding, creating new obstacles for security teams as they conduct cyber risk assessments and work to maintain a strong security posture.
1. Incomplete visibility
It’s harder than ever today to get a clear view of risk. Cloud infrastructure, mergers and acquisitions, and geographically dispersed business units make the corporate digital footprint more complex and dynamic. Not to mention an onslaught of connectivity from work from home devices combined with increasing reliance on third parties to perform necessary business operations complicating your network even more. It’s difficult for many organizations to simply create an inventory of critical assets, let alone assess the risks that are associated with them.
2. Lack of context
To maximize the impact of available resources and get the greatest return on investment (ROI) for security initiatives, organizations must allocate resources based on the severity of risk associated with each asset. Without the right tools, however, security teams rarely have the context they need to identify the most critical risks or potentially severe security events. As a result, prioritizing remediation efforts relies on guesswork more than data-driven decisions.
3. No common language
Disparate systems and teams within an organization typically lack a common language for discussing cybersecurity, KPIs, vulnerabilities, and issues. Without a standard set of KPIs, organizations find it difficult to implement cyber risk best practices, measure performance, track improvement, and determine whether resources are being used effectively.
To overcome these challenges, organizations need continuous visibility into assets and the risk they may be hiding. That’s where Bitsight can help. Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight delivers much-needed visibility into an organization’s overall security posture as well as liabilities and risk in its attack surface. With Bitsight tools for cyber risk assessment, security teams and risk managers can make faster, more strategic decisions about remediation and how to focus resources for optimal impact.
