Implementing an integrated risk management process comes down to the following steps:
- Installing cybersecurity architecture to minimize risk development
- Monitoring for, identifying, and prioritizing risks for mitigation
- Addressing and completely resolving incidents as they appear
- Maintaining regulatory compliance in the face of security risks
- Ensuring long-term security through continuity practices
Step 1: Install Preventive Safeguards
The most foundational part of any business model risk framework is the specific set of controls and protocols it prescribes for minimizing the scope of risks. These are security infrastructural and architectural elements that are installed on, in, and between your systems. Collectively, they restrict and control traffic, providing visibility and governance over your assets. They empower you to know when a vulnerability or threat appears, report on it, and ultimately remediate it.
The safeguards you install will depend upon the specific hardware and software you use, the nature and scope of data processed, and the networks your assets come into contact with.
For organizations that are subject to regulatory frameworks, the specific controls you implement will likely be dictated by those. For example, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) comprises 12 Requirements, which break down further into sub-requirements and other specifications. These may cover your needs, or you may install additional controls.
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Step 2: Identify and Prioritize Risks
Enterprise risk management (ERM) is not a foolproof risk prevention strategy. Instead, it’s a realistic approach to navigating the reality of risks. Even the most well-guarded systems are subject to occasional risks; ERM and similar frameworks account for them with monitoring and intentional mitigation practices. These start with business risk analyses to assign priority scores.
To wit, your business risk assessment framework should consider these factors in prioritization:
- Likelihood – Analyze vulnerabilities, or gaps in your security deployment, to determine how likely it is that they would be exploited. Ideally, assign an approximate chance (%).
- Potential impact – Identify the kinds of costs that would be incurred by both immediate impacts (i.e., theft of IP) and longer-term consequences (i.e., reputation), ideally in USD.
- Resolution difficulty – Sketch out the most efficient route to resolving the risk, including how long it would take, what it would cost, and what other resources would be impacted.
The best analyses assign a single, index-ready value to each risk that weights each of these factors according to your organization’s needs and means, controlling for special circumstances.
Step 3: Mitigate Risks; Resolve Incidents
Once risks have been identified and prioritized, you’ll need to have procedures in place for rooting them out. Often, this will begin with patch management, which is an intentional approach to monitoring for and installing patches as soon as possible while avoiding excessive outages.
However, it should be noted that risks are not always identified before they materialize into something more serious, such as instances of unauthorized access or data compromise.
In these cases, it’s also critical to have sound incident management practices in place. As with risks, incidents need to be identified and eradicated as swiftly as possible. But it’s also possible that resources need to be taken offline and/or backed up to an earlier state of security. Or, you may need to contact individuals or authorities, depending on the severity of the incident.
Step 4: Ensure Seamless Compliance
For many organizations, risk management means contending with both the threat of data being compromised and the fact that the data in question is highly regulated. The factors that make it sensitive—its capacity for identity theft and other personal impacts on your clientele—are reasons you need to manage risks carefully. But they’re also reasons you need to prepare reporting and transparency infrastructure in case a risk does materialize into a data breach.
For example, if you operate in or adjacent to healthcare, you need to abide by HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules, which require risk monitoring and management. But you’re also subject to the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which requires notifying impacted individuals if a data breach occurs.
Additionally, organizations are often subject to multiple regulations and requirements.
This means that ERM in business often straddles several frameworks simultaneously. Your organization’s risk management framework should account for these varied needs in terms of the controls you deploy and the follow-up protocols needed if a risk turns into an incident.
Step 5: Maximize Business Continuity
Finally, you’ll need to have processes in place to keep as many systems running as expected for as long as possible, even in the face of a risk or incident. That means balancing any short-term impacts on users against longer-term concerns. For example: would your customers be more upset with a momentary lapse in platform support or a heightened potential of identity theft?
In the face of an actual incident, taking systems offline to quarantine the threat is almost always the right call. But the actual decisions you’ll have to navigate are often much more complex.
For example, consider risk prevention protocols that require immediate installation, like critical security patches. If there’s an update that will take all your platforms offline, and it becomes available right in the middle of a high-volume shopping event, can your organization justify shutting down its e-commerce shop and losing business (and potentially loyal customers)?
One solution is automating the process with a system like risk priority scores, as noted above.
Manage Risks to Your Business Today
RSI Security is committed to helping organizations like yours rethink their security to protect clientele, personnel, and all other stakeholders efficiently. It all starts and ends with business risk management. We believe that discipline upfront unlocks greater freedom down the road.
That means formalizing risk management processes now will facilitate future risk and incident management, giving you more time and resources to focus on what your team does best.
To get started on your business risk management framework, contact RSI Security today.
