The old saying goes that to get ahead, you need to ‘risk it for the biscuit’ – but, when it comes to IT, we cannot stress enough that you do the opposite.
Protecting your company’s information, data, assets and secure files should be one of, if not your highest, business priority.
Around 49% of CEO’s across the globe have ranked cyber risks as one of the biggest threats to their top line and business growth, showing that business leaders understand the importance of cybersecurity.
But while you may understand the importance, do you really know what cyber risks are and how to manage them?
At Cloud Voice & Data, we are here to guide you on minimising business cyber risks. We have comprised a guide to help you understand and manage your business’s cyber risks.
So, What is Cyber Risk?
The first step of preparing your organisation for cyber risk, is understanding what it is.
By definition, cyber risk is the probability of an organisation’s future exposure, loss or harm to its reputation and/or technical infrastructure as a result of attacks, data breaches and unauthorised or erroneous use of its information systems.
There are several cyber risks to businesses that are important to understand and prevent, including:
- Cyber-crime
- Cyber-terrorism
- Accidental loss of confidential data
- Liability for an organisation’s online activity
Understand your information assets
When considering cyber risk, we often are consumed with the cyber threat itself, rather than what the threat is targeting; the organisation’s information assets. Information assets are any piece of information that holds value to your business. This can vary from physical infrastructure and digital files, devices and employee data.
It is important to understand what your assets are, how they are stored and who has access to them. Once an audit has been established, CVD can help you establish and manage a personalised risk management plan that is unique to your business.
How can IT controls protect your information assets?
So, you know what assets you are trying to protect, but how are you going to protect them? Once an audit on your information assets has been completed, we can put controls and practises in place to minimise the likelihood of cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
General controls, such as computer operations, physical and logical security, and program changes, can usually prevent certain events from impacting reliability, integrity and availability of processing and relevant data.
Application controls are more specific to individual business processes, such as policies and procedures designed and implemented by your business’ IT team. They also include programmed controls within applications, such as computerised edit checks of input data, numerical sequence checks, validation of key fields, and exception reporting and related follow up on exceptions.
Document and monitor your cyber risks
While totally eliminating cyber risk is impossible, minimising your exposure is certainly attainable. Our team of experienced specialists are here to help you document cyber risks in a formal risk register.
By documenting and monitoring your organisation’s cyber risks to your risk register, a database for potential risk and threat scenarios is established. This will help to understand the most exposed areas in your organisation’s cybersecurity at any given time.
Present risk in definitive, quantifiable terms
The truth of the matter is that cyber risk poses a monetary impact on your business – making it essential to present them to business executives in a quantitative way.
Presenting these risks to executives in a quantitative manner removes a large amount of ambiguity and subjectivity from the assessment of cyber risk. While it doesn’t guarantee that the analysis will be accepted by all parties without debate, it does allow for a robust conversation about the variables that were used to derive the quantified output.
How can CVD help?
Our team at CVD is dedicated to ensuring that our clients are protected against cyber risks and attacks.
Our extensive auditing and risk assessment processes, advanced security software, and vast knowledge of evolving cyber risks enable us to work with your business to ensure that you are effectively minimising business risks.
