Information Security and Risk Management

Risk is typically considered to be a warning sign. It prompts caution and demands that the appropriate steps be taken. An organization's risk management strategy and implementation plan are determined by its risk management strategy.

#Information #Security #Management is a set of processes with policies that help manage an organization’s sensitive data, including protecting an organization from data breaches and guidelines on identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks.

Mojisola Abi S.

What is Risk Management?

Risk management has been defined as the process of identifying, analyzing, accepting, or mitigating risks.

Risks can stem from business, financial, technological, legal, management operations, and natural causes. As there is no singular area where risk can come from, there is a need to design a robust risk management strategy that is strategic, innovative, and growth-enabling.

The International Organization for Standardization also known as ISO, developed a Risk Management Guideline ISO 31000 standard, with a five-step risk management process that includes identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, managing, and monitoring risks.

Benefits of Risk Management

A robust risk management strategy will guide the organization by identifying the various risks it poses and their impact on the organization’s operations and sustainability. The overall goal is for the risk management plan to protect the organization, reduce costs, and increase overall success.

As different risk management standards will suit different organizations’ objectives, adopting a framework to build the organization’s risk management strategy requires an alignment between the organization’s goals, strategies, and risk appetite. In protecting an organization and identifying its risks, some of the questions that come to mind are:

1. What are we trying to protect?

What are the valuable resources this organization has that, if exposed, could lead to a threat, breach, financial and reputational damage, or competitive advantage that could impact business operations?

2. What are we failing to identify?

This thought pattern leads to the following questions.

What are our assets?

As simple as it sounds, identifying an organization's assets?is a complex task. It involves identifying everything that defines the organization, the push behind each tick, the environment it operates in, the resources that enable it, and the impact of each tick.

This involves its employees, intellectual property, financial assets, operations, processes, competitive advantage, business model, technology, data, and other assets. In building a robust risk management strategy or function, the risk behind each process step must be identified, as the likelihood of the risk, which would involve prioritizing the risk, its source, impact, actions to be taken to prevent the risk, how to manage the risk should it arise, and monitoring it.

The recommended perspective of risk should be that each risk is viewed as an opportunity to grow, expand, or diversify. Imbibing this perspective in the overall organization's goal and strategy is critical to ensure that growth is enabled and not stifled.

3. What is a data breach?

A data breach is when there is unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Data breaches can be targeted; they can occur by accident or bypass of network security. As such, data breaches can be categorized as technological risks.

Having provided an overview of risk management and its benefits, let us talk about Information Security.

What is Information Security?

Information security, also called InfoSec, involves a set of tools, processes, and security to protect sensitive enterprise information. These processes and tools are put in place to prevent unauthorized access, modification, destruction, and disruption. InfoSec has different types of technology that ensure that an organization’s information is secure across all devices and storage locations.

What is an Information Security Management System?

Information Security Management is a set of processes with policies that help to manage an organization’s sensitive data, including protecting an organization from data breaches, and guidelines on how to identify, assess, and mitigate risks. An information Management System also provides the roles and responsibilities of the people that will be involved in managing information security. It also helps companies to reduce the risks that could occur from a data breach.

There are different types of information security measures, and they include:

• Application security: Involves processes, tools, and practices protecting threats throughout the application lifecycle.
• Cloud security: Involves technologies, policies, controls, and services protecting cloud data applications and infrastructure from threats.
• Cryptography: Involves processes of hiding or coding information to prevent unauthorized third parties access.
• Infrastructure security: Involves processes to protect hardware and software from malicious attacks.
• Incident response: This involves the steps taken to detect, contain, and recover from a breach attack.
• Vulnerability management: This is the process of regularly identifying, assessing, providing reports on, managing, and remediating cyber vulnerabilities across endpoints.

With a lot of companies reporting data breaches and attacks on their cybersecurity, the need for an information security risk management system is critical for every organization.

With this also comes its challenges as there are rising challenges in modern IT security as several companies have migrated to cloud and hybrid computing. Therefore, the need to identify ways to protect these environments is growing.

Is There a Difference or a Relationship?

There is a relationship between risk management and information security, as information security is a tool used in managing technology risks and data breaches, as an example of technological risk. Information security protects the organization by providing a security system that protects the organization from threats and attacks on its technology and infrastructure containing consumer data and intellectual property.

IBM in its cost of data breach report spanning 17 countries and regions and 17 industries reports that the cost of a data breach averaged USD $4.35 million in 2022, a 2.6% increase from 2021. 83% of organizations reported having a data breach; the average cost was USD 4.24 million, which was 12.7% from USD 3.86 million in the 2020 report.

A robust information security risk management imbibed in the overall organization’s risk management and with a practical implementation will eliminate, reduce, and help mitigate the risk an organization experiences.

Data breaches can have severe consequences on an organization by causing financial losses, reputational damage, loss of consumer loyalty, and declining sales. Quantifying the risk of a data breach can be relative, depending on the nature of the breach, exposure, fines, and judgements.