Everyone understands the importance of cyber security. We live in the age of information and communication, where every business uses digital communication channels. Businesses use these channels to transmit and store highly confidential business and customer data. A breach here can result in heavy monetary losses, penalties, loss of reputation, and most importantly, the loss of loyal customers. Cyber risk management, however, has not become as popular as it should be. Let’s look at what it is and how it differs from normal cyber security.

What is cyber risk management?

The need for cyber security is obvious and it goes beyond simply installing anti-virus solutions and firewalls. Cyber security is an IT domain, but cyber risk management is an organization wide ongoing process.

Think of it like fire safety. It is important to ensure that every business has fire hydrants to fight fires, but true fire safety goes much beyond. True fire safety means training people to ensure that their practices do not increase the probability of there being a fire. It means testing the environment and discovering any potential fire hazards before there is a fire. True fire safety is fire prevention, and that is only possible through implementing the right policies, doing surveys and audits, and training people. The same is true for cyber risk management.

Aligning to Organizational Goals

The most important first step of successful cyber risk management is to align it to organizational goals. Cyber security isn’t just an expense that the business must bear – it should also help the business achieve its targets and play an important role in driving customer growth and trust.

A security breach can destroy trust that took decades to build, and thus having adequate cyber security should be a necessary goal of every business. It can also serve as an important competitive advantage – so when a competitor suffers a breach, your business will be waiting as the perfect alternative for the customers they lost.

Uncovering vulnerabilities in the cyber risk management framework

The next step in cyber risk management framework is to quantify its current state, and then talk about what the ideal state of the framework will be. This means that it is important to first to a survey and audit. This will allow the person who wants to change to quantify the problems in the current framework. How many vulnerabilities were discovered? How many systems are at risk? How many should ideally be at risk? The difference between the current state and the ideal state will is the cyber security gap that needs to be fulfilled.

There is another important goal that is achieved by quantifying these two states – it tells the whole organization why the change is required, which makes it easier for them to adopt the new best practices proposed by the new framework. Simply imposing new rules may result in a pushback – properly explaining why things need to change allows for easier acceptance of the new. It also lets you explain to management why you need better cyber security tools.

Presenting value through cyber security

Thirdly, the financial impact of security breaches cannot be understated. The companies are fined millions of dollars by regulators for having a poor cyber risk management framework, but that may be the smallest problem these companies have. The much bigger problem is that loyal customers may never use the services of the business again. A one-time penalty of a few million dollars is survivable, but the loss of business streams forever can be too much for businesses to handle.

If you are worried about cyber risk management within your organization, then you need to look at a solution which allows you to truly enable cyber security throughout the organization. Predict360 works in tandem with anti-virus applications and firewalls to improve the security framework of your whole organization. Get in touch with our team for a demonstration of our cyber security management system and to learn how it can help your business.