Cyber Risk Management ‒ a risk turns into an opportunity

Nowadays, cyber risks are everywhere. Hardly a day goes by without the media reporting on attacks, both domestic and abroad. You are a data security officer, or maybe just an end user, and you are obviously asking yourself: “What has gone wrong here? How could we get so far? Were all our investments in security useless?” All such questions are fully justified! In this blog post, you get the answers, and you also learn how you can manage risk the right way.

Cyber security ever more under pressure

The market in security solutions grows stronger above average, year by year. Yet the news reports on data breaches and cyber attacks do not seem to decrease. Regulators and legislators lag far behind enterprises, but the attention given lately by the media has played an important role. It has made cyber risk management more active and brought it out of the operational back rooms, ever closer to the eyes of top management. On the other side, awareness of cyber risks is more strongly rooted in the steering groups. And there is demand for established processes for targeted investments in the management of these risks.

Factors of success in the development of an effective cyber risk management programme

Making an efficient cyber risk management programme in an enterprise requires specific structures. Regardless of the chosen risk management framework, such a programme consists of the identification, evaluation, treatment and monitoring of risks.

An important factor here is the interdisciplinarity in the risk management team. For instance, it is indispensable to involve specialists from the company departments. It is the only way to understand the criticality of the data being processed. Another example is involving the buying office in the identification of risks since relationships with outsourced services such as cloud services and similar are usually kept by a central buying authority. This will result in a good view over possible concentrations of risks related to providers or third parties.

Communication is the basic tenet – also for your cyber risk management

To communicate risks in a way that is appropriate to the addressees, we advise sketching specific scenarios. This will help make the actual effects of risks on the enterprise and its stakeholders visible and better understood – even without an in-depth knowledge of things cyber. In turn, this helps decide whether each risk must be actively fought, or may be accepted. Reaction to risks will then follow a structured approach, which ideally takes into account the criticality of each risk as well as the cost of implementing the required risk treatment measures.

If risks are known, and the strategy for addressing them is defined, you need to keep them constantly under observation. Any change in the enterprise's environment can directly affect the risk situation; as a result, on the one hand, known risks will become more or less important, while on the other hand, new risks may emerge, which so far were yet unknown.

Here is how you take control of your cyber risks

What does this mean in concrete for you as a decision-maker? It is important that you have a good view over the actual cyber risks to which your enterprise is subject day by day. Only when risks are known and understood can investments in cyber security be effectively driven. In this, we can gladly support you in the whole life cycle of cyber risk management, or also just in selected aspects. InfoGuard's cyber risk management portfolio includes the following services:

• Development of an enterprise-wide cyber risk management program
• Development of concrete risk scenarios
• Analysis of weaknesses (e.g. through gap analyses according to ISO 27002 or NIST Cyber Security Framework, or direct technical assessments)
• Qualitative evaluation and approval of risks
• Definition of risk treatment strategies
• Support in the implementation of risk treatment controls

In addition to the services described above, we also offer solutions for the technical support of cyber risk management processes. The HiScout ISMS Tool can be used for mapping all relevant risk management activities. We can also support you in identifying, evaluating, reporting and continually monitoring cyber risks.

For any questions, or if you are interested in further information, please get in touch with us, and take advantage of our wide and long-standing experience with cyber risks.