A healthy smile takes more work than a quick rinse with some water—it takes daily brushing and flossing, plus checkups with the dentist every six months. Keeping your cybersecurity healthy takes work, too. Daily maintenance, employee training, and authentication help protect your assets, and regular cybersecurity risk assessments highlight where you might have gaps.
In this article, we’ll walk through why these risk assessments are so important and what they might look like.
Why Cybersecurity Risk Assessments Are Essential
Cybersecurity risk assessments aren’t just for big companies with thousands of employees. In a recent survey by Sage Group, they found that “48% of small and medium businesses have experienced a cybersecurity incident in the past year.” Cyber threats are constantly growing, and your company needs protection.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
If you don’t conduct regular risk assessments, you put your company in serious danger. The threats you face include:
- Data Breaches: Data breaches are costly financially and through data loss (including customers, clients, and proprietary information).
- Downtime: Ransomware attacks can cause days (or weeks) of operational downtime, losing valuable hours of revenue and customer communications.
- Reputational Damage: Businesses that experienced a cyber attack find it harder to keep and attract customers. According to a recent survey, 47% of respondents reported increased difficulty acquiring new customers, and 43% reported losing customers.
Instead of leaving your small business vulnerable to these threats, take charge by conducting regular risk assessments.
What Is a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?
A cybersecurity risk assessment helps your business by identifying, evaluating, and mitigating potential risks and threats.
- Identifying: Understand your assets and their vulnerabilities.
- Evaluating: Determine the likelihood and impact of potential threats.
- Mitigating: Prioritize actions to address risks effectively.
These assessments help strengthen your security in several areas: compliance, business continuity, and strategic planning.
There are a lot of factors you face as a business owner, but a risk assessment helps you comply with regulations (HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS) that require evidence of regular risk assessments, maintain integrity in case of a breach, and plan for the future.
How to Conduct a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment
Step 1: Identify and Classify Your Assets
First, you need to understand what you’re trying to protect. This may include:
- Hardware: servers, endpoints, mobile devices
- Software: applications, cloud platforms, databases
- Data: customer info, financial records, intellectual property
Step 2: Identify Potential Threats and Vulnerabilities
Once you know what you’re protecting, you need to understand what you’re protecting it against.
Common Threats
- Phishing Emails that trick employees into giving away credentials.
- Ransomware Attacks that encrypt critical information in exchange for payment.
- Insider Threats, whether intentional or accidental.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks that disrupt your operations.
Common Vulnerabilities
- Outdated Software: Not updating your software could cause problems down the road.
- Poor Access Controls: Disregarding MFA and other protections can increase your risk of attack.
- Untrained Staff: 68% of breaches involve a non-malicious human element. Help your employees understand protocol for schemes like spam and phishing.
These threats are more common and more sophisticated than ever.
Step 3: Evaluate Existing Security Controls
As you start evaluating your systems, ask yourself the following:
- Are controls effective and up to date?
- Are firewalls, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and multi-factor authentication (MFA) in place?
- Do you have regular data backups? Have they been tested?
Knowing what you’re already doing well can help you identify gaps in your system where you can improve.
Step 4: Assess Likelihood and Impact of Risks
One of the best ways to evaluate the potential impact of risks is by using a risk matrix. As you place potential risks on a matrix using both the probability of the event and the severity of the impact, it will highlight areas that are most important to your business.
It’s important to consider areas like financials, operations, and reputational impact. Here are a few examples:
- A phishing attempt on a marketing team member may have a low likelihood and minimal impact if they are properly trained.
- However, a ransomware attack on your financial systems would likely rank as high risk due to its severe consequences.
Once you have a list of your risks, you can prioritize them to know what to address first.
Step 5: Develop and Implement a Mitigation Plan
The next step is determining how you will address the risks you identified in your cybersecurity risk assessment. There are four routes you can take:
- Avoid: Stop risky activities altogether (e.g., the use of insecure devices).
- Reduce: Implement stronger access controls or update firewalls.
- Transfer: Obtain cyber insurance to cover costs in case of an incident.
- Accept: For minor risks, document them and revisit later.
Your mitigation plan will outline how you will avoid or reduce risks and often involves upgrading existing controls, training staff, or creating new policies.
Step 6: Document Everything
As you’re conducting your assessment and making changes, make sure you keep clear records of your assessment process, findings, and action plans. Documenting will help you improve your processes and prepare for any audits, insurance details, and regulatory compliance. Enlisting the help of an experienced IT company can help.
Step 7: Review and Update Regularly
Just because you’ve finished one assessment doesn’t mean you’re finished. Cyber threats are advancing at an alarming rate. Your risk assessment and responses should too.
Most companies should conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment at least once a year. How frequently you conduct audits may depend on the size of your business, regulatory compliance, or disruption risk. Sometimes, audits based on departments are more effective. These regular reviews (either quarterly, annually, or after major changes) can help protect your business and data.
Elevate Your Cybersecurity Strategy Today
Completing a cybersecurity risk assessment for the first time can be difficult. Hiring an external organization well-versed in protecting businesses like yours can make things easier. At Simple Systems, our job is to make sure you are as protected as possible against serious cyber threats. We can ensure your audit is thorough and help you implement any necessary changes.
We make IT easy. Contact us today to get your cybersecurity risk assessment started.
