What is Cybersecurity Risk Management?
Cyber risk management consists of the strategies your company implements to assess, mitigate, and protect your network from cybersecurity threats. It addresses a combination of technology, people, and processes to preserve and protect your organization’s information and intangible assets.
By addressing a combination of technology, people, and processes, you identify potential risks, analyze the impacts of those risks, and create response plans to address the risks.
Why is Cybersecurity Risk Management Important?
Every organization needs a cybersecurity management plan to reduce the impact and damage caused by cyber threats. The increasing role of information and data in the life of modern corporations has led to an explosive growth in data volumes. More than half of all organization’s information is stored in a database format. For example, in the financial sector, databases store information on the consumers, accounts, and cash transactions. The oil and gas sector’s database stores production, transportation, storage, and shipment information of petroleum products.
The activity of any large corporation depends largely upon the functions of corporate applications that automate key business processes. Such applications contain critical information such as financial statements, consumer data, employee personal data, and so on. As a result, the databases storing the critical information becomes one of the main targets for malicious cyber-attacks.
The consequences of such attacks include service failure, downtime of information services, loss/leakage of critical information. These consequences result in financial loss and damages to the organization’s reputation. Therefore, cybersecurity risk management is necessary to protect the company from these consequences.
What is the Source of Cybersecurity Risks?
The source of cybersecurity risks primarily come from errors and vulnerabilities that appear in your organization at different stages of development, implementation, and configuration. While there are various safe practices and programming techniques to increase the safety of your network, there is always the possibility of error. As such, cyber risk management addresses the three primary
Of course, various safe programming techniques are currently available and used, but your software and application does not exclude the possibility of human error.
3 Fundamentals of Cybersecurity Risk Management
As a result, companies must use cyber risk management to mitigate these cybersecurity risks. They use systems to evaluate their cyber protection by addressing the technology, people, and processes in their network. These three aspects are the fundamentals to having a secure cyber risk management system.
1. Technology
In cybersecurity, technology consists of the hardware and software used to achieve a reliable and secure defense. IT people build processes around these mechanisms to prevent compromises to the IT infrastructure. It evaluates and observes behavior in your organization’s network to detect hackers or malware.
For example, technology in cybersecurity includes an authentication response system or an automated evaluation of your network’s security. These automated tools make your cybersecurity risk management progress faster and more efficiently.
2. People
Cybersecurity needs people to drive the cybersecurity process from multiple angles. They include leaders and decision makers such as C-suite executives and other management teams. Cybersecurity people also include the employees who implement cybersecurity such as the IT team or third-party consultants.
When looking at cybersecurity, people are one of the most important aspects to consider because they are also often where an organization is most vulnerable.
3. Processes
Finally, the last fundamental to cybersecurity risk management is the processes. The cybersecurity processes provide the framework for governance and creates a measurement for your cybersecurity strength. Processes evaluate and reports your organization’s preventative and responsive controls. To have an effective cybersecurity system, processes are a necessary support to ensure the system is working properly. It also ensures that there are multiple people responsible for making changes to the system.
Combine the Fundamentals for a Cyber Secure System
Combine parts of these three fundamentals to cybersecurity risk management to build a sturdy security roadmap. Each fundamental idea must be included and incorporated together to result in the best protection for your network. If your cybersecurity system is missing even one fundamental ideal, then your security is weaker and more vulnerable to cyber threats.
All three fundamentals are reliant on each other. There must be some sort of technology that can be used and implemented to monitor and evaluate your organization’s cybersecurity. To implement the technology, people are needed to build it and decide on which software or hardware would best fit for the organization. Additionally, people must go through a process to decide on the technology. It must go through multiple steps and evaluation to ensure that the technology is best fit for the system.
Conclusion
Technology, people, and processes. These three fundamental parts of cybersecurity must work together to build a strong and secure defense network. While building your cybersecurity strategy, consider all three aspects to ensure you can properly evaluate errors and vulnerabilities in your system. By addressing these three aspects of cybersecurity, your security risks and vulnerabilities will decrease.
Therefore, you must choose and organize your technology carefully to optimize its functions with your organization’s systems. Teach your people about the importance of cybersecurity and build a culture of cybersecurity to minimize human error or carelessness. Implement processes to streamline your business and ensure there are proper steps that must be followed to protect your network.
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