Proactive recognition, remediation, and mitigation of security threats are rising challenges for global businesses today. Security risk assessment is an integral part of this equation.
Security assessments are periodic exercises that examine your company's security preparedness, allowing you to identify risks and reduce the likelihood of future cyberattacks.
The trouble is that manual systems and legacy processes aren't reliable and can hinder the overall effectiveness of your risk evasion strategies. They don't respond very well to vulnerability checks meant to strengthen your IT systems, which can ultimately impact the response and action time.
Business leaders need to be hyper-focused on security risk audits to ensure their networks are protected and strong. A lapse in risk assessment data can lead to a vulnerable attack surface and a weak security posture. A real-time data-driven risk assessment can reduce the risk exposure and take your cybersecurity fortifications to the next level.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 40% of the BODs will have a devoted cybersecurity committee managed by a competent board member. Cybersecurity has become a key interest for board members as companies are facing the quick realization of cyber impact on business continuity and success. Cyber attacks can derail a company's operations and vastly reduce its constituents' trust in the company’s ability to protect sensitive information from data breaches.
Now, more than ever, companies need to have a margin for error, specifically when there are stakeholders involved, as it can lead to significant financial losses.
Automation Increases Response and Action Time
Automating your risk assessment process and management can facilitate growth and eradicate human error while helping you make informed financial decisions, streamline risk and compliance workflows, and enhance the organization's risk profile.
Automation is a significant driving factor for change in various advanced industries. And by 2030, it's projected that automation may fully replace over 800 million jobs, changing how businesses work, plan, and engage with others.
The response and action time for security teams is improved as real-time threat intelligence and risk reports allow employees to handle threats more effectively while working with a higher safety level.
Manually gauging and managing security control compliance can lead to human error and skewed results and drain time and resources. But an automated risk management plan can collate, categorize, upload, and organize all inbound data accurately and efficiently. It also lets you search for similar incidents that might have happened previously to check for action plans and responses.
By eradicating manual jobs and real-time monitoring, risk managers can also pay more attention to risk avoidance and mitigation. Also, automation expedites the overall risk management process by uploading new data instantly and reporting incidents faster.
Real-time view and monitoring of your company's cybersecurity stance can demonstrate gaps and let you know the required security jobs for remediation.
Automated assessments also enable a more efficient and robust cybersecurity risk management standpoint and provide security teams with detailed and updated results that they can communicate to higher leadership and executives.
Different departments in the same company often leverage diverse, potentially conflicting data to evaluate or describe the same aspects of cyber risk. For instance, if an executive remarks that one day he got a report listing assets that are sufficiently protected, however, the next day, some other department reported the listed assets under threat. A situation like this can leave the managers in a confusing position.
Moreover, there are multiple advantages to automating redundant tasks, including improving productivity, saving time, freeing up human resources, and reducing mistakes. In that way, they can take up more projects and essential tasks. Based on your business requirements, you might be able to automate all labor-intensive processes related to security risk management and assessment.
What Are Some Of The Risks Of Implementing It Improperly?
The latest Forrester study reported a 361 percent increase in the ROI derived from automated security risk processes, so there is no denying the fact that they work. However, it is also imperative to ensure exemplary implementation to avoid the following risks:
Inability To Monitor Unidentified Risks
Not all systems are fail-proof. However, it's tempting for various businesses to be overoptimistic about their security, specific that they have dotted their i's and crossed their t's and have everything managed.
Unfortunately, not having automated security risk assessment and breach detection systems in place can lead your business to encounter unknown security risk compromises, infecting the system for an extended period.
Automating The Wrong Tasks
If you are fretting about your password security and go for an automated system that compels all users to reset their passwords every month -that is not a safe move. Recurrent password changes/resets can cause users to set less secure and more straightforward passwords.
Malicious actors can take advantage of weak passwords. A better solution would be to implement an automated two-step authentication system, requiring users to provide a secondary code that the software will send to their devices after the initial login attempt.
Set It And Forget It
Cybersecurity demands a proactive approach, not reactive. And the "set it and forget it" is a reactive way that addresses problems and conducts audits only after an occurrence of a particular incident. At the same time, a proactive approach patches vulnerabilities and flags issues before potential risks arise.
Along with automated security risk assessment solutions, it is unequivocally imperative to check on your systems and stay abreast of the evolving threats to ensure maximum protection.
How Does Automation Make Things Easier To Scale At An Enterprise?
Here are some ways automation makes the overall process easier concerning security risk assessment.
Scalability
Automated security risk assessment platforms are specifically designed with scalability in mind. They function just as effectively with a few tasks as they may do with numerous tasks (given sufficient storage, computing power, and more).
Automated assessments can quickly acclimatize to almost any organization's growing needs which means that your company does not have to be concerned about recruiting and training new people. Businesses can also avoid financing numerous solutions every time the business grows.
Predictability
With automated systems for security risk assessment, you can work coherently in all circumstances (with some exclusions for platforms driven by Machine Learning (ML)). That means the response actions they implement are almost entirely predictable.
These actions remain safe indeterminately, and you can identify and fix security vulnerabilities, making it easier to control separate system interactions, such as content publications or monetary transactions.
Tracking
With automation, you can seamlessly determine the completed assessment parts, their completion time, and what's left. Leveraging one platform, you can instantly get greater visibility into the risks, threats, and overall security assessment progress. Moreover, an automated risk assessment solution allows trend forecasting to foresee potential risks and analyze particular causes.
As the inbound data gets simplified with risk assessment automation, risk managers are updated with accurate information whenever they report risks. This process goes a long way in helping them ascend and implement viable strategies to mitigate them.
How Can Companies Track ROI Of Automation?
Leveraging risk assessment templates and management software makes it easier to gauge your effort's ROI. Beyond the money saved by preventing adverse events, the solution can also automate time-consuming and tedious tasks, saving considerable time.
Automation analytics is an excellent tool for fully measuring and understanding your security risk assessment efforts. It allows your data to work for you by recognizing and remediating issues proactively.
Some of the relevant and useful features within automation software for IT decision-makers and business leaders who want to corroborate their automation tactics are savings planners, automation calculators, and reports.
Even though determining ROI for automated security risk assessment is different from other business processes, the goal remains to convey to IT managers that the investment was well worth the resources and time it monopolized.
Conclusion
To fully understand the vulnerabilities and threats of your business, it's imperative to work with a professional IT company like CyberSaint that can successfully help you implement a well-suited system for your company. Automated security risk assessment can perform repetitive maintenance tasks and keep your business secure while recognizing breach challenges before infiltrating your company system.
The CyberStrong platform can help your company gain unparalleled visibility into risk, foster security resilience, and automate IT compliance.
If you are interested in simplifying your security risk assessment methods, contact CyberSaint today.
