Repairing a weakness in your IT environment is always easier than dealing with the consequences of that weakness — like, say, a massive data breach — sometime later. This means your security team must be proficient at finding those weaknesses and assessing your IT environment’s vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities can include weak passwords, poor patch management, and lax security training.

Every successful risk management program works by identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, and mitigating risks. In most enterprises this process is repeated at regular intervals, so that organizations can generate data each time about the threats to business operations, the risk those threats pose, and the steps necessary to reduce risk. That is an enormous amount of data a company must track. To do so — and to do so smartly — companies can build a risk register.

Amid escalating data breaches and supply chain attacks, businesses are placing an unprecedented emphasis on third-party risk management. That’s a logical and prudent idea, but achieving this level of security requires a comprehensive approach — which makes a checklist for third-party risk assessment indispensable. In this article, we’ll explore what that checklist for third-party risk assessments should contain.

Information security is the effort companies undertake to protect their enterprise data information from security breaches. Without information security, an organization is vulnerable to phishing, malware, viruses, ransomware, and other attacks that may result in the theft, tampering, or deletion of confidential information. The average cost of a single incident can run $4.45 million.

A customer walks into a clothing store to purchase a pair of pants. The salesperson directs them toward ten racks, all filled with khaki pants. Some are slightly different colors. Others are hemmed differently. But overall, the pants are essentially identical: monotonous, repetitive and drab. The problem is, the customer wants jeans, yoga pants and navy slacks. They feel isolated, confused and like they don’t belong. They leave the store without buying anything.

Businesses face risk all the time – and that’s OK. Even though the word “risk” typically has negative connotations, the term can actually represent many situations, not all of them unfavorable. ISO 31000 states that risk is the “effect of uncertainty on objectives.” That actually means risk can come in two types: positive and negative.

Cyber attacks have grown significantly over the last few years, and their cost to victim organizations marches ceaselessly upward as well. Now many of those victim organizations are learning the hard way that business insurance policies often won’t cover the regulatory fines from security incidents that are considered “preventable.” Hence the need for extra protections from “cyber insurance” to fill any coverage gaps you might have.

As companies continue to face new and increasing cybersecurity risks, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a cyber risk scoring methodology that helps organizations to assess, quantify, and manage their cybersecurity posture effectively. The NIST Cyber Risk Scoring solution improves NIST’s security and privacy assessment processes by providing real-time contextual risk data, enhancing awareness, and prioritizing necessary security actions.

In recent years, social media platforms have become invaluable tools for businesses to engage with their customers, reach a wider audience and enhance their brand visibility. From TikTok’s viral challenges to Instagram’s visually appealing content — and the ever-present Twitter and Facebook — these platforms offer unparalleled opportunities for organizations to connect with their target market. However, with great opportunities come great risks.

Risk management is a team sport. So whether we are assessing health risks during a pandemic, understanding the effect of natural disasters, or trying to block a cybersecurity attack, risk communication serves a vital purpose. Risk communication aims to inform and educate individuals so they can make informed decisions and take appropriate actions in the face of uncertainty.

As expected, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules today requiring publicly traded companies to make more disclosures about the cyber risks they have and the specific cyber attacks they suffer.

Misconfigured security settings can be disastrous for a company’s cybersecurity. In 2019, for example, a researcher discovered a security misconfiguration in the popular project management tool Atlassian JIRA that allowed him to access a vast amount of confidential data from companies that used JIRA. Unfortunately, Atlassian’s error is all too common.

Investments in effective risk management, and especially in IT systems to manage risk, have historically paid huge dividends. In a 2023 PwC US Risk Perspectives Survey, 57 percent of C-suite respondents reported seeing better decision-making capabilities thanks to investments in such applications. But there is still significant room for improvement in enterprise risk management, starting with better risk modeling and forecasting.

Cybersecurity is ever-changing and a critical consideration for business survival. One must always be prepared to keep their business secure and their customers satisfied. But how do you keep up with all the compliance framework changes, such as last October’s SOC 2 guidance updates? This was my challenge as the GRC manager at a SaaS startup: an updated compliance framework version would be released, and I’d need to figure out how to incorporate the new requirements.