Begin 2021 With a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment

Data breaches have become commonplace in today’s highly connected world. A week hardly passes before you hear news of some major retail chain, consumer credit reporting agency, or Government/Public Sector entity falling prey to cyber intrusions.

Preventing cyber threats calls for immediate action on your part. Keeping your sensitive data safe from bad actors may seem like a daunting task. By performing a cybersecurity risk assessment on your systems, you will be taking steps to identify threats from people, process and technology that might compromise systems and data.

What is a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?

Like an annual wellness checkup for your health, a cybersecurity risk assessment is a diagnosis of potential threats for your organization before something serious occurs.

It is more of a proactive evaluation that identifies any systems, networks, software, physical, device, or other threats or vulnerabilities your company might face, the likelihood of occurrence, impact on the organization, controls to mitigate and a resulting risk rating  The assessment results will then provide you with steps on how to best remediate areas in need of attention and prioritizing these efforts based on risk ratings.

Why Your Organization Needs a Cyber Security Risk Assessment

1. Information gathering to protect against future threats

Information security is a critical aspect of any organization or entity. It is also the most vulnerable. A cybersecurity risk assessment lays the groundwork for your IT security plans. This allows you to gather all company network data, including vulnerabilities, and evaluate the current status of your protections.

The cybersecurity risk assessment will also evaluate employee permissions, software, backup solutions, devices, and more to ensure all bases are covered.

The result of your cybersecurity risk assessment will be a list of all threats and vulnerabilities with recommendations your organization should take to shore up your defenses. While no plan can 100% guarantee your organization never falls victim to cyber-attacks, implementing your risk assessment solutions adds new security layers to your network. Therefore, whenever an incident occurs, the damages will be minimized significantly by these recommendations.

2. Regulatory Compliance Requirements

Some industries require businesses to meet certain regulatory requirements to operate. These requirements often include mandatory cybersecurity risk assessments from qualified personnel or entities. It is always best to use trusted third-party providers that meet your information security compliance regulations and who can provide an impartial assessment.

3. Increased Employee Cyber Awareness

Did you know that over 66% of organizations implement cyber security awareness training for their employees? Technical actions are always the most popular, as 83% of organizations improve their systems and devices from the cybersecurity risk assessments they conduct.

The digital and corporate world is getting more dangerous with the constant evolution of cyber threats and attacks. Therefore, part of your cybersecurity risk assessment will always involve an evaluation of your employee training and testing efforts.

This evaluation reveals the effectiveness of employee training and how employees respond to simulated cyber-attacks.

Routinely testing your employee’s cyber security awareness actions also gives security analysts an idea of the company’s savviness in detecting potential cyber-attacks.

4. Increase Employee Productivity

Besides helping you to detect vulnerabilities, cybersecurity risk assessments allow you to identify outdated hardware, software issues, and other vulnerabilities. Most of these vulnerabilities may also affect employee productivity.

Older hardware versions and incompatible software can slow down your network drastically and result in unplanned downtime. Outdated hardware and software that are no longer supported present risks because no updates or patching are available.

However, performing a cybersecurity risk assessment can detect these vulnerabilities and provide the best recommendations to address them. This, in turn, improves employee productivity and performance.

Re-Evaluate Your Risk Assessment Results and Strategy

The work does not stop after you have implemented your risk assessment solutions. You will need to re-assess your strategies to ensure they are working and are effective. Types of testing often used include penetration testing and control review/testing.

Threats are always changing. Therefore, you must routinely perform a cybersecurity risk assessment to ensure new risks are identified, reduced and managed.

Contact SCA for Cyber Security Risk Assessment

SCA’s cybersecurity risk assessment identifies any notable weaknesses and vulnerabilities of your systems and data. We also perform network and application penetration testing to identify pathways an attacker can exploit to access your systems and sensitive data.

Using our recommendations, we provide organizations with remediation strategies to protect you against cyber threats.

Contact us today to help identify, reduce and manage the cyber risks your organization faces. Please check out our Breach Notification Guide to learn about the breach notification laws and requirements in your state.