Risk Analysis and Management
There exists a little confusion between risk analysis and risk management in terms of cybersecurity. While some consider them as sharing cause-effect relationships, others consider them as sharing counter of each other. Before dwelling deep into risk analysis and management, let’s clear out this confusion. Risk management is a recursive activity where IT administrators go into periodic analysis, planning, implementation, control, and monitoring of the implemented measures pertaining to cybersecurity. However, on the contrary, risk analysis is a rather need-based activity that is done at discrete time periods, i.e., once in a year or on-demand.
Nevertheless, it is fine to regard both of them as correlated, as they are usually called off sequentially in the world of cybersecurity or in any IT paradigm. Risk analysis involves intuitive exercises such as:
- What type of cyber-attack is this?
- What does it intend to achieve?
- How successful is the organization’s cybersecurity system to curb this attack?
- How much loss did this cyber-attack cause to the organization’s IT infrastructure as well as the whole of the corporate establishment?
- What is the likelihood that such cyberattacks can occur again?
- What are the loopholes in the current security infrastructure that needs to be revamped to avoid such issues in the future?
It can be observed that the above-mentioned questions are comprehensive enough to conclude any cybersecurity risk assessment in an effective yet diligent manner. Similarly, risk management is also comprehensive to let cybersecurity serve its due duty. Cybersecurity risk management framework includes:
- Categorization of IT system so that subjected cyber-attack does not hamper other healthy infrastructure or data streams.
- Identification and implementation of security control to curb the subjected attack.
- Assessing the control operation to see if it is capable enough to mitigate the subjected cyberattack.
- Authorizing the control while keeping in view the outcomes of risk assessment and application of security controls.
- Constant monitoring of the security control system and be ready to update them as soon as something new comes up.