As technology has advanced exponentially, your mission significantly depends on technology. Being a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), you know that any disruption to your information systems can interrupt your operations, lower your supply chain, affect your reputation, and compromise customer data as well as intellectual property. This is why so many CEO’s are getting a supply chain risk assessment to see where the flaws in their supply chain are and how they can improve it through better technology. As per the 2013 Cyber Crime Study by the Ponemon Institute, the annual cost of cyber-crime for enterprises is $11.6 million per year ranging from $1.3 million to $58 million.
Important Cyber Risk Management Concepts
Involve cyber risks in current Risk Management Solutions and governance processes.
Cyber-security is more than enforcing a checklist of requirements-Cybersecurity is controlling cyber risks to an acceptable level.
Start cyber risk management discussions with your team.
Interact regularly with those who are accountable for managing cyber risks. Increase your awareness of existing cyber crimes affecting your business and related business impact.
Enforcing industry standards and best practices. Do not depend upon compliance.
A robust cyber-security program takes into account industry standards and best practices to safeguard systems and tracks potential problems. It notifies processes of new threats and allows on time response and recovery. Also, hire ServiceNow consulting services or similar experts who can build a streamlined GRC process that helps identify risks and implement IT controls and align risk management.
Analyze and control particular cyber risks.
Determining critical assets and related impacts from cyber threats is important to understanding an organization’s exposure to risk–whether competitive, reputational, financial, or regulatory. Risk assessment results help to identify and prioritize particular protective measures, assigning resources, notifying long-term investments, and implementing policies and strategies to control cyber risks.
Provide oversight and review.
Executives have responsibility for managing and ensuring enterprise risk management. Cyber take care of activities involves the continuous evaluation of cyber-security budgets, IT outsourcing, cloud services, incident reports, IT acquisition plans, risk assessment results, and top-level policies.
Develop and track incident response plans
Even a secure organization will experience a language to address and control cyber risk as a cyber incident at some point in time. When network protects mission equal in priority to other risk-prone areas, such as being penetrated, a CEO should be ready to answer, financial and reputational risk. “What is the plan B?” Cyber incident response plans should be practiced every day.
Coordinate cyber incident response planning throughout the business
Fast response actions can prevent or limit possible damage and need coordination with your business leaders and stakeholders. This involves your Chief Information Officer, Chief Security Officer, operators, general counsel, Chief Information Security Officer, public affairs, and human resources. Make sure you integrate cyber incident response policies and procedures with current disaster recovery and business continuity plans. You will need to make sure that your staff are well versed in this area and have the proper training to handle this, that is why things like human resources training as well as other training courses, need to be conducted routinely to ensure little to no incidents.
Keep up awareness of cyber threats.
Situational awareness of a business cyber risk environment includes on-time detection of cyber incidents together with the awareness of current threats point within the Federal Government for critical and vulnerabilities particular to that organization and related business impacts.
Evaluating, managing, improving the cyber risk management processes and embedding risk data from different sources and active participation in threat information and sharing with partners help find and respond to incidents speedily and helps to ensure that a company’s protective efforts commensurate with the risks.
Risk management process
You should begin with a cyber-security framework evolved from each area of the business to conclude what the perfect risk posture of the business have to be.
Guidance Software advises utilizing new technologies that can identify and map data throughout the enterprise. As soon as data is mapped, enterprises make actionable decisions on how to govern data and minimize their risk footprint. For instance, even with the cyber security training and a stable security culture, confidential information can leave an enterprise simply by accident, for example, data stored in secret rows in spreadsheets or incorporated in notes within employee presentations or lengthy email threads. Scanning the business for essential data at rest and then eliminating any data stored where it does not belong entirely, minimizes the risk of a random data loss.
Deloitte advises that the risk management process takes into account the Capability Maturity Model approach that has the following five levels:
- Initial (ad hoc, chaotic, and individual heroics) – the beginning point for the use of an undocumented repeat process
- Repeatable – the process is documented perfectly and repeating the same steps may occur
- Defined – the process is explained and affirmed as a standard business process
- Controlled – the process is quantitatively managed as per agreed-upon metrics
- Optimizing – The process management involves deliberate process optimization/improvement.
When the required risk posture is concluded, scrutinize the enterprise technology infrastructure to understand a baseline for the current risk posture and what the enterprise requires to perform to shift from the current state to the required state of risk exposure.
Till the proactive steps are taken to know potential risks, there will be less risk exposure and falling victim to a cyber attack.
Deloitte also advises performing a risk/reward calculation, finding a reliable cloud backup then standardizing those network security enhancements to achieve the greatest improvements at the minimal cost. Some businesses may be convenient for most security upgrades being made. Others, typically in regulated industries, will desire to be comfortable with all security upgrades. There should be incremental steps and goals, like 5 percent improvement within five months that can be calculated to check if the enterprise is moving toward its decided cyber-security risk posture.
Regular process
Cyber-security risk management is a continuous process. The NIST Framework calls it “a living document” that is needed to be revised and updated as per requirements. Once an enterprise performs its original risk assessment and progresses from the existing to the desired risk posture, periodic or regular assessments should be performed to look for new vulnerabilities and how to address them to manage the risk posture at the desired level.