Cyber Risk Management in 2022: New Challenges and Opportunities
Cyber risk management has undergone a significant change over the last couple of years. What once was the headache of the IT or risk management department is now an issue of considerable interest to the Board and senior management.
You do not have to be an expert to realize that the way businesses serve their customers has changed radically in the last couple of years. The heavy emphasis on digital capabilities in order to attract, engage, and support customers and prospects has changed how senior executives view cyber risk. What was once a technology niche issue is now central to the organization’s ability to retain business relationships, reputation and cash flow.
The transition of cyber risk management, from technology niche to Board-level business issue, attracts bigger spending budgets and critical focus than ever before. It also changes how departments, teams and business managers address cyber risk, with the emphasis now firmly on business enablement. Cyber risks are constantly evolving and have become more frequent than ever before, therefore they needed to be addressed with the at most effectiveness in order to successfully lead the business towards its objectives.
Given the escalating nature of cyber risks – as highlighted in a recent Forbes article – ignoring the threat to business continuity that they pose, it is simply not an option to ignore them. Some of the statistics highlighted in the article are alarming. For example, the research indicates that cybercriminals can penetrate 93% of corporate IT networks. It also highlights a 50% increase in cyber-attacks in 2021, with under-resourced small and medium businesses most at threat. Clearly, an ever more digital world demands organizations and decision makers capable of responding to these threats proactively.
The question is: How?
One approach is to take a very prescriptive approach to cyber risk management, so that a policy defines how employees do their job to a significant extent. The problem here is that this removes the flexibility that business users rely on to adapt to changing requirements.
Another alternative is to embed cyber risk standards and processes into the business so that the organization seamlessly adopts all necessary requirements.
Next Steps
The first stage is to make your cyber risk policy easy to access, use and understand so that people from the entire organization can access the information when they need it. This demands a SaaS-based technology platform; easy to navigate, find, and access the business’ cyber guidelines as well as provide reporting, audit, and, potentially, compliance requirements the organization might need to follow. This helps avoid the plethora of documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks; spread across multiple file shares, that often make up a cyber risk policy document library. This setup is hard to navigate for users, and a challenge for risk managers trying to maintain a consistent, accurate, and up-to-date policy library. A central policy library also helps the risk team support end-users in understanding and reviewing what they need to put in place.
This approach makes it easy to provide education, training, assessment, and attestation capabilities. These help end-users understand, implement, and even enforce cyber risk policies and standards themselves, rather than relying only on the IT or risk team.
Furthermore, it also simplifies many of the complexities of cyber risk management. Given the breadth and depth of many business operations, each with its own unique potential cyber risk issues, trying to keep ahead of the game in terms of seeing the entire cyber risk picture at any moment can be daunting. A flexible but centralized model provides end-users with the ability to implement the cyber policy in a way that works for them. It also offers you the ability to spot check these arrangement as needed, to allow you to see at glance the implementation of a cyber policy. You can quickly detect where inconsistencies can be found within an end-to-end process spread across multiple departments, or where changing cyber threats could leave you exposed. It also allows you to provide management and compliance reports quickly and easily against your policy standards, your customers’ own requirements, or those demanded by regulators or external auditors.
Mitratech’s GRC Platform offers a powerful and proven cutting-edge technology SaaS governance, risk and compliance (GRC) management solution that allows you to capture, assess and manage your cyber risks. Quick to deploy and fast to deliver value, our solution can help you minimize your risk exposure in order to increase your efficiency, cut costs and replace tedious manual processes with a fully digital platform.
