Written by guest contributor Ken Lynch for the CS4CA Newsroom.
Did you know that malicious hackers get access to at least one computer every 39 seconds? A report by the University of Maryland highlights the vulnerability of computer users to these hackers all over the world.
The ever-evolving field of information technology requires a highly dynamic IT team to establish protection measures to safeguard your assets. The loss of any asset can be extremely retrogressive to your organization, and it has the potential of crippling the operations.
As such, consistent risk assessments should be conducted to ensure that you detect cyber threats that may lead to a loss of assets. But how?
Identifying Critical Assets in an Organization
If you want to develop a comprehensive risk assessment plan, you should compile all the critical assets that need protection. The identification process guarantees a detailed and more targeted assessment approach, which increases the probability of success in blocking their occurrence.
Critical assets are the company’s properties that are highly sensitive and can detrimentally affect the integrity, confidentiality, and the overall functionality of the organization. Such assets include patents/copyrights, personally identifiable information, organization’s financial data, human resource data, internal operation systems/processes, software, and sales information.
One of the surest methods that you can use to identify your critical assets is by conducting a comprehensive risk assessment regularly. This exercise will reveal all the processes that are crucial to the operations of the company and how to protect them from cybercriminals.
What is Risk Assessment?
This is a process that entails the identification of risks that could affect your organization adversely and offering workable mitigation processes. The risk assessment process involves all the stakeholders in a company to ensure that all the possible cyber threats are identified before they cause harm to your critical assets.
What is the Link between Risk Assessment and the Protection of Critical Assets?
To achieve complete protection of critical assets, you should ensure that you establish formidable mitigation strategies. These protection techniques should solely be based on the findings and recommendation of the risk assessment process. As such, the most critical assets of any given organization should receive the most elaborate security.
Prioritization of the risks is a necessary factor when deciding which critical assets to protect in your organization. You should develop a metric that will help all the stakeholders to identify the most vulnerable assets during the risk assessment process. Once your team compiles the risk report, you should follow it to the letter to keep the cyber attackers at bay.
How to Use Risk Assessment to Protect Critical Assets
Risk assessment is useful since it provides a clear image of all the vulnerabilities in your organization. The following steps are crucial in guaranteeing a comprehensive report:
1. Identification of Cyber Threats and Risks.
You cannot institute mitigation measures if you are not aware of the features of the risk that you’re fighting. As such, you should always start by conducting a comprehensive survey of all your assets and assess the possible cyber-attacks threats. Ensure that you include the chief information security officer (CISO) and a strong IT team.
2. Evaluation of the Risks.
After you’ve identified the prevailing threats, it’s paramount that you decide which poses more harmful effects to your organization. This is a critical process since it’ll help you in ranking the risks and prioritizing on the mitigation strategies.
3. Ranking.
This process is crucial since it will ensure that no attack will occur to the degree of crippling the operations of your organization. At this stage, the IT team need to decide which of the assets is more critical to the daily running of your organization. Once your team of stakeholders identifies the critical assets, they should rank them highly to ensure that they are given preference.
4. Mitigation.
During this phase, you should always ensure all critical assets are protected from any threat. Even when your organization has a limitation of resources to develop the mitigation strategies, the essential assets should be considered first. Always ensure that all the mitigation strategies can be evaluated for consistency and efficiency to ensure that the assets are always protected.
Mitigation Strategies to Protect Critical Assets
After the risk assessment and identification of risks in your organization, the team of experts will recommend the following practices to ensure the success of the entire process:
• Reconfiguring the Software System.
If the assessment has identified a loophole in the organization’s software system, it’ll be necessary for the IT team to reconfigure it, thus eliminating the risk and strengthening the security for the critical assets. If you have different software for different departments in the company, you should ensure that they are synchronized to guarantee flawless operations.
• Adopting a Multi-Authentication System.
The primary aim of the risk assessment should be to identify the weaknesses in your systems that could expose your organization to hackers. If the team recommend limiting the access to crucial asset’s information, then you should consider the multi-authentication system. This will ensure that only certified persons access the critical assets of your organization, thus making it easy to monitor its safety situation.
• Segmentation of Departments Handling Critical Assets.
If you allow everybody to handle critical assets in your organization, their security will likely be compromised. As such, you should only enable specific machines and specific individuals to have access to the information. That way, you will easily track the threats and eliminate them before they cause harm.
• Development of Strong Passwords and Firewall.
You should configure your systems in such a way that malicious individuals will have a difficult time trying to access your critical assets. One of the best methods is to ensure that the password is strong enough such that the hackers cannot guess it easily. Also, you can institute a firewall system that will block all suspicious activities in your system. Such a system will require your approval before the assets are accessed.
Adherence to Mitigation Strategies
Once the mitigation processes for critical assets are determined, your organization should strive to ensure that all the stakeholders adhere to them. To achieve this, it’s paramount that you conduct the following basic exercises:
• Training.
It would be futile to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment if the risk mitigation measures are not followed. As such, you need to hold a training session to inform all the members on the benefits of implementing the strategies. You should also outline all the mitigation procedures and demonstrate the best practices that will guarantee security for critical assets.
• Monitor the Systems.
Introducing a constant risk monitoring system ensures that the efficiency of the mitigation strategies is not compromised. While the processes can be extremely demanding, there are automatic software systems that can simplify it. They give real-time report making them highly efficient in detecting any anomaly.
• Never Ignore any Sign of Cybercrime Attack.
If your detection systems report anomalies, you should act on them immediately. Any delay will give the attackers time to maneuver through the systems creatively.
Conclusion
Protecting your critical assets should never be an option for your organization. Ensure that you conduct regular risk assessments to identify the risks that encompass your assets.
After the identification, you’re obliged to institute mitigation measures that will thwart any effort to access the critical assets illegally. Ensure that all the parties in your organization follow the protection strategies for guaranteed security.
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Author Bio
Ken Lynch is an enterprise software startup veteran, who has always been fascinated about what drives workers to work and how to make work more engaging. Ken founded Reciprocity to pursue just that. He has propelled Reciprocity’s success with this mission-based goal of engaging employees with the governance, risk, and compliance goals of their company in order to create more socially minded corporate citizens. Ken earned his BS in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT. Learn more at ReciprocityLabs.com.
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