Cyber Security of an Organization: Risk Assessment

By Asenika Liyanage  11/11/2020 

Risk assessment is key in an organization, when managing the Cyber Security of that organization. Thereby, it enables the specialists to understand required policies, preventive and control measures required for the specific organization. With proper Risk assessment, mitigating various risks in a technology - based environment can be facilitated. Through this discussion, we will focus on basics of Risk Assessment useful for your organization. 

Identifying Risks

Risks can be identified and defined in relation to Cyber Security. A Cyber Security risk would be a potential harmful factor that can affect the organization through data breach or any other technical malfunctioning. Thereafter, it would cause damages to Organization in terms of security, reputation, or financial aspects. 

Cyber Security Risk Assessment 

Risk Assessment of an organization is an advanced process, where, each risk has to be identified, analysed and evaluated. This evaluation is done based on the Potential threat level of the risk, Likelihood of risk occurring and Impact on business processes. 

Further, Risk Assessment s important in identifying the appropriate Cyber Security tools for the organization, based on the types of potential risks. 

Importance of Cyber Security Risk Assessment 

Why do we need this assessment? There are several very important reasons for doing a proper Cyber Risk Assessment. 

    1. Financial Reasons 

            - Carrying out a complete Cyber Risk Assessment would be costly. However, it would help mitigate any future costs, that may arise due to potential threats. Hence, it can be considered as a reduction of any unnecessary future costs. 

    2. Organizational Aspects 

            - There are key benefits for an organization such as creation of a risk assessment template for any future Cyber Security Risk Assessments. Further, identifying vulnerabilities leads for better organizational knowledge on which aspects to be improved. 

    3. Security Aspects 

            -  Most importantly, this process helps to identify potential threats such as data breaches, loss of confidential information, misplacing of information, data alterations and reputation impacts on organizations. The whole organization would be in trouble, if you do not properly protect confidential information of your clients, reputation wise as well as in front of the law.  

Responsibilities and people 

A Cyber Security Risk Assessment can easily identify the potential resources, that could be compromised during an attack. This could be hardware, software resources or details of customers, Patents of the organization like sensitive resources. 

First an estimation of risks is done, followed by selection of controls to mitigate the risks identified. However, it is very important to identify and monitor environmental factors of the organization, to detect any changes the in the identified risk factors. 

In a medium or large scale organization, in-house IT team should be capable of doing this assessment with the guidance of executives. However, for a small scale organization, you may have to higher some external experts in carrying out this process properly. 

For further reading related to implementing this risk assessment process in your organization, check the below articles as well. 

Further Reading 

1. How to Perform an IT Cyber Security Risk Assessment: Step-by-Step Guide

2. Cyber Security Risk Assessment

3. Security Risk Assessment

4. 6 Steps to a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment