IT Risk Assessments
Introduction
An IT Risk Assessment is a comprehensive review of the IT organization, with the objective of identifying existing flaws that could be exploited to threaten the security of the network and data. It serves as the basis for deciding what countermeasures, if any, to take in reducing risk to an acceptable level, based on the value of the information resource to the organization.
What benefits accrue from an IT risk assessment?
An IT risk assessment does more than just tell you about the state of security of your IT infrastructure; it can facilitate decision-making on your organizational security strategy. Some of the benefits of conducting an IT risk assessment are:
Identify security threats and vulnerabilities
Conducting an IT risk assessment can help locate vulnerabilities in your existing IT infrastructure and enterprise applications, before these are exploited by hackers. Appropriate action can then be taken to patch and fix these vulnerabilities, reducing IT risk and the potential impact of any breach.
Identify the maturity level of existing security controls and tool usage
An IT risk assessment can help evaluate the existing defenses and preventive / corrective controls in place. The identified areas of improvements can then be mapped against the current technology landscape to ascertain if improvements are possible (additional security controls or a possible correlation of data arising from these controls that can result in advanced threat intelligence, for instance). The IT assessment thus highlights remediation measures to maximize current investments.
Enhance enterprise-wide security policies
Not only will the assessment help plug holes in your security, but by tying IT risk to enterprisewide risk management, it can help create more secure solutions, practices and policies within the organization. This will improve the overall security of information in the organization and help identify what security strategy best suits your organization.
Gauge security awareness and readiness
An IT risk assessment needs the involvement of various IT security personnel, as well as other employees and managers, which will help you gauge how aware various individuals and departments are of security threats, vulnerabilities, practices and solutions. It also gives a measure of how well the employees and contractors understand and follow the enterprise’s security policies and standards. An IT risk assessment may thus, point to the need for security awareness campaigns or workshops for your employees.
Justify security investments
Reviewing existing IT infrastructure and studying the potential business impact of a compromised system can help make a business case for security spending. An assessment can present a fair analysis of security investment versus potential losses and costs from security breaches.
Prove security due diligence
With IT risk assessment regulations likely to come into play in the next few years, it is important that your organization have documented proof of conducting assessments on a regular basis. Moreover, if you have insurance that deals with data loss, the insurance organizations will demand proof that the appropriate security measures were in place (in case of an incident). IT risk assessment documentation can help prove that.
Understand the security maturity of your partners
A recent study by PwC has found that the biggest challenge to security today is from internal (employees and partners), not external threats. A robust IT assessment includes assessment of security measures within your partner network. Findings from the assessment can help plan better defenses against third-party attacks. The overall objective of an organization’s security strategy is to ensure the protection of information (whether its own or that of customers, suppliers, and other parties) and assets.
An IT risk assessment is a major preventive measure that actively mitigates the risk of vulnerabilities and threats negatively impacting the organization. A traditional IT risk assessment reviews IT-related issues such as outages, application downtime and hardware failures. It comprises three main steps:
Evaluation
The evaluation phase focuses on understanding the critical resources that may be affected by the threat or vulnerability. Business evaluation can be conducted by:
Identifying critical business processes and assets
The first step is to identify all the information, processes, and information assets that are crucial or important for the functioning and security of the business. Identifying these critical components will help you decide what you want to protect, and what the consequence of losing them would be.
Identifying vulnerabilities
A proactive review process to check for inherent vulnerabilities that could be exploited and affect the organization. When identifying vulnerabilities, remember to view them within the context of the business, i.e. how they will affect your business as a whole. Gathering information on potential threats to your organization’s information: Knowing what threats each of your IT assets may face and from where those may originate can help formulate a plan of defense.
Risk Assessment
The risk assessment phase consists of determining the likelihood and the severity of threats and vulnerabilities. Not all threats are equal—some happen more often than others, and others are more devastating to the organization’s infrastructure. The first step in identifying the worst threats is to find out how likely it is that the threat will occur. Next, quantify the impact the threat could have on the enterprise. Then, by mapping threats and vulnerabilities, likelihood, and impact to critical information, processes, and information assets, you can determine a scale to rate the severity of the consequences of an event or a breach in security. This will help determine which threats or vulnerabilities you need to prepare for.
Risk Mitigation
Risk mitigation is all about preparing to face a potential threat or tackle a possible vulnerability. It requires the organization to take many steps, either on its own, in collaboration with the IT infrastructure providers or with the aid of IT security organizations. There are three measures your organization must have in place: