5 Steps to Successful Security Risk Assessment

Every organization should perform a security risk assessment as part of its risk management procedure. If you wonder what it is, well it involves the identification, assessment, and implementation of important security controls in applications. This helps prevent any possible application security defects and vulnerabilities.

The Procedure

There are various factors that figure in a total security risk assessment. Examples are size, growth rate, asset portfolio, and resources. Most companies perform a generalized assessment when under a budgetary or time constraint.

However, the problem of these generalized assessments is that it doesn’t give detailed mappings between assets, impact, risks and mitigating controls. This is when an in-depth assessment is necessary involving:

1. Identifying the important parts of the organization’s technological infrastructure.
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3. Diagnosing sensitive data that are created, stored or transmitted by the assets and then creating individualized risk profiles.
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5. Assessing identified security risks for important assets and then determining how to effectively and efficiently allocate the right time and resources to mitigate it. This is decided based on the connection between threats, vulnerabilities, assets and mitigating controls.
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7. Coming up with the right mitigation procedure with enforced security controls for each associated risk.
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9. Implementing the right tools and processes to minimize the threats and vulnerabilities affecting your firm resources.
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Problems Security Risk Assessment Solves

There are various problems a comprehensive security risk assessment can solve in an organization. They include:

1. Identifying the organization’s assets like network, applications, tools, servers and data centers.
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3. Creating risk profiles for all assets
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5. Understanding the data stored, transmitted and generated by the assets
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7. Assessing assets connection in business operations like the overall impact on revenue, reputation and how it can end up exploiting a firm.
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9. Measuring asset risk ranks and prioritizing them
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11. Applying mitigating controls on each asset based on assessments

Industries That Need a Security Risk Assessment

Most organizations handling some form of personally identifiable or health information related to the business operations collected from partners, clients and customers need periodical assessments.

This is because the information collected includes the person’s social security numbers, tax identification numbers, passport details, medical history and other confidential information that cannot be risked breaching.

It’s important you know that a security risk assessment is not a one-time procedure. You never know when your company’s security is breached, which is why this is a continual procedure.

It has to be performed at least once every alternate year to keep your company updated with any threats and risks it’s exposed to. Visit https://riskintelligence.eu/ for more information on security risk assessments.