You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know it exists. Admittedly, you know cyber risks are real issues all manufacturers face. But you won’t be able to implement the right security solutions without a clear idea of the risks your company encounters.
Before you can put in place effective cybersecurity controls to repel threats, you have to identify your weaknesses and highlight the areas that require the most attention. Through analysis and assessments, you can identify, analyze and evaluate risk to determine where your money and time is best spent.
Risk analysis and assessment are key to optimizing security spending, ensuring you implement products and services that yield the most return. Without such insights, you may have a snag in your supply chain without even recognizing the weakness. With them, you can surround your networks and data with steel-armor protection against malicious behavior.
Understanding the risk assessment process
A cybersecurity risk assessment is the industry-standard method for identifying potential security threats that could plague business assets, such as hardware, systems, computers, data and intellectual property. Cyber risk can describe anything that may contribute to a security issue, including hackers; non-technical or inadequately trained staff; backup operators; technicians; and storms, floods, fires or other environmental dangers.
While risk assessment methodology varies, the process generally involves the following focus areas:
- Understanding the scope of the project.
- Collecting relevant data.
- Analyzing current policies, procedures and security measures.
- Performing threat and vulnerability analyses.
- Evaluating information to generate strategic recommendations.
As such, along with identifying potential risks, these assessments also highlight security controls and solutions that can mitigate the chances of attacks, viruses, breaches or other threats to information assets. Thorough assessments seek to answer questions such as:
- Where is there a lack of protection?
- Who and what are the risks and vulnerabilities?
- How can we minimize loss or damage caused by cyberattacks?
- Does each security solution meet the corresponding regulatory requirement?
- Which solutions are appropriate responses to the identified risks?
The answers to these questions guide informed cybersecurity choices, ensuring companies don’t expend time, effort and resources on unnecessary or ineffective measures of defense. What’s more, the assessment can highlight overlooked risks that may require more attention than originally planned.
You can perform cybersecurity risk assessments on virtually any digital applications, devices and processes within your business. However, the immediate focus should be on the internal and external systems that are most critical to operations, as well as the elements that process, store, analyze or transmit sensitive information, such as personal data, confidential company figures or intellectual property.
A complete risk management process calls for continuous assessments to monitor and review the environment for new threats, as well as align security measures with changes in business processes.
STEP ONE: Security impact analysis
Here at Certitude Security, the first element of our risk assessment services is the security impact analysis. Our process is led by a verbal interview with relevant members of your team and executives to start generating awareness around the potential risk within the business from an internal perspective. This will help us better understand the specific implications of cyberattacks on your company, as well as how we can minimize your greatest concerns.
STEP TWO: Vulnerability assessment
Once we gather the relevant information from your team, it’s time to analyze the environment to determine whether the current safeguards are effective in maintaining data confidentiality and integrity. Our vulnerability assessment includes three major components:
- Interrogating the environment.
- Scanning the environment.
- Searching for exploits within the environment.
The insights from vulnerability assessments will identify how the current security systems are working in accordance with your needs and expectations. What’s more, the process may bring to light the alternatives that are the most worthwhile improvements.
THE RESULT
Together, the security impact analysis and vulnerability assessment form the “tip of the spear” of your cybersecurity efforts. After running our tests, we’ll let you know where the gaps in your security measures exist and advise on how to close them with advanced tactics, techniques and procedures. With a clear idea of where you are and where you need to be, you’ll be that much closer to building a strong wall of cyber resiliency against security risks. Afterall, you cannot manage what you fail to measure.