Checklist for Conducting Security Risk Assessment

Not having the right kind of security in place in your organization can make you pay a heavy price. It can impact and compromise integrity, confidentiality as well as the availability of information assets in an organization. This is why an assessment of security risk is important at regular intervals as it ensures you are looking at the right tools and tactics needed to safeguard your company from unexpected pitfalls.

Risk assessment is imperative to make certain an organization is well protected and prepared for any kind of dangers or potential threats that lurk. Here is a checklist that you need to follow in order to ensure you come up with the right assessment for your security risks.

Recognize all vital assets

First of all, you need to find all of the assets that you think are valuable to the organization. You need to look at them and accordingly distinguish depending on how they can be harmed in a manner that leaves you with monetary loss. Some of the assets you need to carefully and extensively look at are websites, partner documents, customer credit card data, servers, trade secrets as well as client contact information.

Gain an understanding of potential consequences

Next, you have to look at the kind of financial losses the organization is going to suffer. This can determine the degree to which an asset gets damaged. To gain an idea about this, you need to look at system or application downtime, legal after-effects as well as data loss. This helps you make a careful security risk assessment.

Keep a check on vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited

Get an idea about weaknesses that allow threats to breach your security. Also, check how they can cause harm to an asset. Even gain perspective on what safeguards your system and the security measures that are in place. Remember, vulnerabilities can be physical such as old equipment and issues with software design or configuration. However, they can also be human elements. This includes careless or untrained staff members.

Analyze the risk involved

Risk is basically the extent and potential that a supposed threat is going to exploit vulnerabilities. This can cause harm to one or more assets which can lead to monetary loss. It is important to gain a correct understanding of the logical formula of the risks. It is also important to assign a value to it based on the categories of low, moderate, or high. After this, develop a solution for every moderate and high risk as well as put together an estimate of its cost.

Put together a risk management plan

Use the data you find to put together a risk management plan to reduce threat vulnerability. Put together a strategy and see that you go through with this in the best possible manner. Clearly define mitigation processes. This ensures you can investigate what exactly happened, why it happened and you can devise a plan to avoid it.

All in all, as long as you define your requirements, recognize and analyze risks as well as evaluate it accordingly. Following this, if you devise risk treatment alternatives as well as conduct regular assessments of the risk, you can ensure you find the best framework needed to help you with security risk assessment. This is sure to help your company in a big way and make sure you have a complete and elaborate way to understand your risks and offer the right kind of security for it.

Hi,I am Abhilash Tyagi, an active blogger since 3 years. I love to gain and share knowledge by means of writing. I write on topics like lifestyle, technology, fashion, Food, business. Follow me: @abetyagi