A threat assessment is basically identifying things that could harm your assets and assessing their ability to do so. In terms of cybersecurity, an IT risk assessment is all about reducing the probability or potential severity of incidents that could damage or destroy your IT resources or the information within. As security professionals, our responsibility is to help organizations make informed, risk-based decisions.

Why is it important?

Conducting a Risk Assessment will help you understand and plan to mitigate risks to your organization. It is important to understand that a cybersecurity risk assessment is not a solution to risk, but it can become your guide to mitigating unnecessary risk wherever possible.

Before an organization can improve its cybersecurity posture, it must understand the threats and vulnerabilities that can endanger its processes, procedures, or implementations. These threats may comprise common cyberattack methods, operational risk, or industry-specific risks. Auditing your IT risks has multiple benefits, including:

Determining your threat profile

To come up with a solid mitigation strategy, you need to first understand your IT risk profile. Proper risk assessment will help you determine the following threat characteristics:

  • What are your IT security threats and their internal/external sources?
  • What is the reason for the identified threats or vulnerabilities?
  • What is the probability of each threat materializing?
  • What is the potential impact/damage to your organization if a threat materializes?

After determining your IT risk profile, you can prioritize high-probability risks and identify mitigation solutions to help avoid potential losses in the future.

It helps to protect you against breaches

Businesses choose to conduct a risk assessment to protect them against costly and disruptive breaches. Risk treatments can be ways to protect your business from cyberattacks and to better improve protection of private data.

Highlighting and patching pulnerabilities

IT risk assessment can help to pinpoint key security vulnerabilities that require fixing. The objective is to identify security loopholes that any remote-based or local “bad actor” might successfully exploit to breach your IT system. Be sure to test your network’s defenses using ethical hacking techniques. Your firewalls, password security, endpoints, antimalware, and other protocols or tools should also be tested regularly. Based on your findings, you can develop and implement practical solutions to help improve your overall IT security.

It increases employee cyber awareness

Cybersecurity risk assessments are great for that “top level” view of your risk. They’re also great for teaching employees how to avoid cyber threats in their day-to-day work. As part of the assessment process, you’ll find the areas where employees are courting danger in your network. A good MSP should be able to connect you to training resources. Those training programs can do a lot to help close the door on cyber crime.

Complying with Data Protection Rules, Regulations and Laws

Depending on your industry and the types of data you store, your organization could be subject to cybersecurity compliance requirements. For example, educational institutions must abide by FERPA, and healthcare organizations are subject to HIPAA. Insight IT’s experts are well-versed in various compliance standards, and a risk assessment will clearly identify where your organization meets compliance and where you do not.

When you investigate your data compliance levels, you may be able to identify and fix any shortcomings before it’s too late. Most data protection rules impose hefty penalties for non-compliance

A risk assessment turns intangible concepts such as security, risk, and prevention into tangible realities with actual costs attached.

Whether working with small and medium-size businesses, corporates or government departments and agencies, Insight IT provides a full cybersecurity service offering. If you need any on reviewing your organization’s security posture contact us at 1300 911 000.