Do businesses really understand their business risk?
Each organisation faces risks and doing business is becoming increasingly complex. Likewise, security risks to businesses have evolved in complexity, so the question posed is, do businesses understand their risks and how to address them? As it makes good business sense to understand your risks and how to minimise them. An effective risk assessment can help you identify, assess and implement strategies to mitigate identified risks. Yet, considerations such as company size, assets and growth pace can affect the scope of any risk assessment.
A security risk assessment is a methodology of identification, analysis and evaluation to understand the risks, causal factors, probabilities and consequences. For example, an assessment can concentrate on impact severity of future business events on your company objectives and the likelihood of such events occurring. Importantly, management can view their business holistically, as it supports a much more informed and broader decision-making process.
We start by examining how to identify and mitigate your risks. A risk management strategy can assist you to do this by describing how you deal with risks to your business. By committing time and resources to develop your strategy for managing risk, you’ll not only provide a safer workplace but reduce the potential of negative impacts.
What problems can a security risk assessment solve?
Identifying security risks generates a clear, comprehensive and concise list of potential sources of risks and threats that could impact your business operations, or delivery of services. This is achieved by mapping risk sources from a threat assessment, defining organisational asset criticality and the way these facilitate or inhibit vulnerability.
The objective is to generate a list of threats and risks which potentially effect the protection of your people, information and assets and identify the sources, exposure and potential consequences of these threats and risks. Consideration is also given to contemporary and the emerging risk environment of your business.
Identify security risks
Each risk is described as comprehensively as possible, so that management can fully understand their position. In preparing a list of security risks, we consider issues such as:
• The potential event, or incident and the consequences
• The likely outcome and impact of a risk occurring
• When could it occur, or frequency
• The physical location and associated assets potentially affected
• How could it occur such as sources of potential threats and triggers
• Why could it occur, such as underlying existing factors, vulnerabilities or deficiencies in security controls
• Who could be affected, such as stakeholders
We then create a risk profile for each identified asset and understand what is generated by these assets, including the impact to income, reputation and the likelihood of company exploitation.
Effective risk management helps you make clearer business decisions. It includes reducing those factors that can have an adverse impact on your business. Importantly, you can explore more confidently, opportunities which have positive impacts on your business.
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