This is the basic process of risk management.
Risk is the possibility of damage happening and the ramifications of such damage should it occur. Information risk management (IRM) is the process of identifying and assessing risk, reducing it to an acceptable level, and implementing the right mechanisms to maintain that level. There is no such thing as a 100 percent secure environment. Every environment has vulnerabilities and threats to a certain degree.
The skill is in identifying these threats, assessing the probability of them actually occurring and the damage they could cause, and then taking the right steps to reduce the overall level of risk in the environment to what the organization identifies as acceptable.
Proper risk management requires a strong commitment from senior management, a documented process that supports the organization’s mission, an information risk management (IRM) policy and a delegated IRM team. Once you’ve identified your company’s acceptable level of risk, you need to develop an information risk management policy.
The IRM policy should be a subset of the organization’s overall risk management policy (risks to a company include more than just information security issues) and should be mapped to the organizational security policies, which lay out the acceptable risk and the role of security as a whole in the organization. The IRM policy is focused on risk management while the security policy is very high-level and addresses all aspects of security. The IRM policy should address the following items:
Objectives of IRM team
Level of risk the company will accept and what is considered an acceptable risk (as defined in the previous article)
Formal processes of risk identification
Connection between the IRM policy and the organization’s strategic planning processes
Responsibilities that fall under IRM and the roles that are to fulfill them
Mapping of risk to internal controls
Approach for changing staff behaviors and resource allocation in response to risk analysis
Mapping of risks to performance targets and budgets
Key indicators to monitor the effectiveness of controls
Shon Harris provides a 10,000-foot view of the risk management process below: A big question that companies have to deal with is, “What is enough security?” This can be restated as, “What is our acceptable risk level?” These two questions have an inverse relationship. You can’t know what constitutes enough security unless you know your necessary baseline risk level.
To set an enterprise-wide acceptable risk level for a company, a few things need to be investigated and understood. A company must understand its federal and state legal requirements, its regulatory requirements, its business drivers and objectives, and it must carry out a risk and threat analysis. (I will dig deeper into formalized risk analysis processes in a later article, but for now we will take a broad approach.) The result of these findings is then used to define the company’s acceptable risk level, which is then outlined in security policies, standards, guidelines and procedures.
Although there are different methodologies for enterprise risk management, the core components of any risk analysis is made up of the following:
Identify company assets
Assign a value to each asset
Identify each asset’s vulnerabilities and associated threats
Calculate the risk for the identified assets
Once these steps are finished, then the risk analysis team can identify the necessary countermeasures to mitigate the calculated risks, carry out cost/benefit analysis for these countermeasures and report to senior management their findings.
When we look at information security, there are several types of risk a corporation needs to be aware of and address properly. The following items touch on the major categories: Physical damage Fire, water, vandalism, power loss, and natural disasters
Human interaction Accidental or intentional action or inaction that can disrupt productivity
Equipment malfunction Failure of systems and peripheral devices
Inside and outside attacks Hacking, cracking, and attacking
Misuse of data Sharing trade secrets, fraud, espionage, and theft
Loss of data Intentional or unintentional loss of information through destructive means
Application error Computation errors, input errors, and buffer overflows
The following answers are incorrect:
The process of eliminating the risk is not the best answer as risk cannot be totally eliminated.
The process of assessing the risks is also not the best answer.
The process of transferring risk is also not the best answer and is one of the ways of handling a risk after a risk analysis has been performed.
References: Shon Harris , AIO v3 , Chapter 3: Security Management Practices , Page: 66-68 and http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/Understanding-risk