Benefits of a Risk Management Program
Everyone knows they should have a solid Risk Management Program, but what exactly does that mean? Let’s take a look at four program essentials for implementation of a successful risk management program:
- Evaluate and create an asset inventory
- Assess your environment and its susceptibility to to vulnerabilities/risks
- Review and define your risk scales
- Define your workflow for assessing risk and vulnerabilities
Taking a deeper dive into these four program essentials let’s add a little color to each one.
Evaluate and create an asset inventory
Try to establish an accurate asset inventory of all assets with your environment. Once you have established a complete asset inventory, assign business owners and custodians to ensure responsibilities are assigned and maintained as expected. Compliance requirements, such as those for SOC, require an asset inventory so it’s always best to have a comprehensive asset inventory developed and maintained.
Assess your environment
Prior to any risk analysis being performed or implementing a risk management program, there must be a baseline of a risk sensitivity score assessed and recorded for each resource/environment. This assessment allows the organization to rate the the resource’s importance to the organization from an information security perspective and relative to the overall enterprise environment.
Define risk scales
Also within your risk management program you will need to define the qualitative risks scales for assessing the severity and likelihood of a given risk or more specifically a given threat/vulnerability relationship that presents risk. Of course, these risk scales will vary based on your organization and the maturity of your risk program.
Implement workflow
Last but certainly not least you will need to define the workflow for assessing and processing any newly identified risks. The implementation of this workflow will more than likely have the most impact on the success of your organization’s risk management program. The success of your risk management program is entirely up to you and how well the sum all of parts are implemented for your program and governed within your organization.
