Why Your Company Should Consider Conducting a Risk Assessment This Year

No one likes to get caught off guard and end up paying a high price because they weren’t prepared. Reducing risk exposure is an important part of any business continuity plan.

One of the reasons that approximately 60% of small businesses end up closing their doors within six-months of a data breach is because they were unaware of their risks and how to properly mitigate them.

When you’re not prepared, one cybersecurity event can mean major damage to your company.

Risk assessments help companies take stock of where they stand in a number of areas that impact their health and wellbeing. This includes areas such as email security and backup and recovery strategies.

When you don’t have a risk assessment done regularly (or at all), you’re flying blind when it comes to threats and how well your infrastructure is protected against them.

What Does a Risk Assessment Do? 

A risk assessment uses a methodology such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to identify, assess, and prioritize organizational risk.

Risk assessments are designed to cover a wide range of operational areas and show you in a snapshot which areas are leaving you at risk and how. This allows you to address any vulnerabilities before they result in a costly crisis.

What Are the Benefits of Having a Risk Assessment? 

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from having a risk assessment done, you don’t need to be a large enterprise corporation.

A risk assessment can provide you with the following advantages.

Keep You from Suffering Security Incident

Risk assessments will show you where in your cybersecurity infrastructure weaknesses exist. This allows you to address them before they can result in a major problem.

The average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million and the long-term results can follow companies around for years, including loss of customer trust.

Ransomware infections are also devastating to businesses. A risk assessment can give you insight into how well your backup and recovery strategy is protecting you and how well your employees are protected from phishing attacks.

Boost Compliance Efforts

By having your technology infrastructure assessed for risk, you’ll be bolstering any data compliance requirements that you have for regulations like HIPAA, PCI, and others.

Additionally, if you suffer a breach, but can show good faith efforts to avoid one, like having a risk assessment and implementing its recommendations, you may avoid the worst compliance penalties.

Know Where to Spend Your Technology Budget

Risk assessments can reveal areas of a technology infrastructure that need attention as well as those that are already well fortified.

Having a better understanding of where your risk lies can help you make better decisions about where to invest your technology budget.

Educate Employees

When you go through a risk assessment, it’s also a training opportunity. Employees get a better idea of how their actions impact their company’s risk when it comes to data security.

The information from a risk assessment can also inform your employee training program, adding something that may have been found to be lacking and leaving your organization at risk.

Improve Productivity

You can have areas of opportunity revealed when doing a risk assessment. For example, say that employees are being hampered by an inefficient login system that also leaves your network at risk. If you switch to a single sign-on (SSO) or passwordless system, that change can improve both security and productivity by making it easier for your users to sign in to all their applications.

Justify an Expense

For larger organizations, it can be difficult for a department to justify a desired expense without documentation to back it up. A risk assessment can provide the justification needed for an IT expenditure that can help to mitigate a particular area of risk.

For example, purchasing a business VPN subscription to help secure connections for remote and mobile employees.

Gives You an Improvement Roadmap

Often, a business will know that they need to make improvements to ensure business continuity, but they don’t know where to start.

Because risk assessments will typically prioritize recommended action items, it acts as an improvement road map for an organization, letting them know which are the most critical areas that they should focus their attention on first.

Instills Better IT Security Habits

One problem that can plague an organization is when employees adopt bad habits that put data security at risk, such as sharing passwords or not using a lock screen on their company laptop.

By doing a risk assessment, it puts everything out in the open and shows how bad habits can risk company security, making it a catalyst to better IT security habits.

Improve Your Business Security Posture with a Risk Assessment

Risk assessments can make a significant difference in your business security and ability to mitigate future crises. C Solutions has an expert team that can help!

Schedule your risk assessment with us today!  Call 407-536-8381 or reach us online.