Cyber risk management is rapidly becoming the foundation of organizational security efforts, replacing checklist compliance as a cornerstone of a successful security program. This shift has come from the unique configuration of technologies specific to a given organization that industry or geographic regulations were not designed to accommodate.
The shift to prioritizing risk encompasses compliance, assuming that best practices are implemented alongside controls specific to the unique risks that the organization faces. Unfortunately, managing risk and maintaining compliance using old products like modular GRC software has proved to be more troublesome and even harmful to organizations needing greater program visibility. Here we’ll examine the critical risk management capabilities necessary for a platform to help teams effectively manage risk.
Research has found that about half of IT risk management (ITRM) practitioners look for automation for their risk remediation processes. In contrast, the other half seeks to track their compliance management processes. Information Technology Risk Management software uses management systems and services that function across all levels of your life cycle. Some core functions of ITRM are the facilitation of risk workflows, aggregation of data from IT and security operations, the creation of risk and control repositories, establishment of consistent cybersecurity risk management processes, risk mitigation, and remediation protocols, compliance standard reporting, analytics tracking, and customizable risk reports to present to C-suite, board members, and external stakeholders.
Essential Functionalities in a Cyber Risk Management Solution
By keeping track of the following items, you can confidently invest in a risk management system that continuously monitors your company’s ITRM efforts.
Workflow Automation
Workflow templates that facilitate processes related to your risk management, cybersecurity, and auditing practices.
As a cyber risk management platform, CyberStrong helps enable robust and asynchronous workflow automation out-of-the-box through the roles function and the ability to assign an individual responsible for the control and collaborators, allowing for a transparent chain of responsibility across an assessment.
Compliance Content Mapping
How flexibly can you map controls and protocols to requirements from different frameworks and regulations and provide evidence for auditors and stakeholders?
In the CyberStrong platform, both risk and compliance teams can attach evidence at the control level. Furthermore, they can leverage crosswalking abilities to project their compliance status from one framework to another.
Cyber Risk Analysis
The use and integration of qualitative and quantitative risk assessments. Risks should be clearly mapped to business processes and include threat modeling.
With more integrated platforms like CyberStrong, risk and compliance are addressed together. In the CyberStrong platform, risk assessment protocols are baked in at the control level - allowing organizations to understand risk and compliance at the same level of granularity.
Cyber Risk Remediation Life Cycle
This is for the flexibility of customizations with workflows suited to your organizational structure and risk ranking. Additionally, this works with dashboards that can provide a targeted view of risk information across IT, security, privacy and compliance.
Effective risk-based solutions like CyberStrong will enable collaboration across the remediation cycle regardless of whether a given team is centralized or distributed. Teams can track their remediation from one assessment to the next using the snapshot feature and illustrate that progress to leadership.
User Experience
A good user experience will focus on operational effectiveness and functionality, enabling your IT. The more accessible the program is to your team, the easier it is to learn and utilize multiple-driven approaches and workflows.
Integrations
Any integrated risk management should support seven essential integration criteria. These are:
- Data loss prevention
- Threat and vulnerability management
- Application security testing
- Secure configuration management database
- Digital forensics and incident response
- Threat intelligence platforms
- Identity and access management capabilities
- File Integrity Monitoring
Real-Time Cybersecurity Risk Assessments
A management tool that allows you to monitor your risk in real-time is vital to continuous risk monitoring. It is necessary for benchmarking and moving away from static reporting practices like spreadsheets.
Platforms that support real-time and continuous assessment are built fundamentally different from the modular governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tools organizations use when taking a compliance-first approach. CyberStrong supports continuous assessment by enabling risk, compliance, and audit teams to review and update in real time while delivering unprecedented visibility to technical and business-side leadership.
Board and Executive Reporting
A great integrated risk management solution will contain the capabilities to translate your data into a readable, natural language format. This can help justify your case when asking for more security funding or explaining your IT risk management strategy to the board and stakeholders.
CyberStrong’s Governance Dashboards deliver previously unseen visibility to executive leadership on the risk and compliance posture of the organization. Fully customizable, the Governance Dashboards enable information security leaders to present the status of their program clearly and effectively to the Board and the entire C-suite.
Digital Asset Discovery
The ability to evaluate risks associated with web-based integrations such as cloud-based technologies, social, mobile delivery channels, the IoT and wearable devices.
Thankfully, an integrated risk management solution like CyberStrong can cover all your ITRM needs and much more. By utilizing patented AI technology and real-time risk assessment workflows, your ITRM initiatives can become streamlined and optimized from a small business to an enterprise level. Contact us to learn how CyberStrong can solve your risk management needs with our all-in-one cyber risk management solution.
