Published on: May 26, 2020
Risk Based Security Assessments
Today, business faces multiple forms of risk from a wide range of sources. Some risks are individual and industry specific, while others are unpredictable and shared across the business landscape. Potential threats to a business could include; information security breaches, legal disputes, operational failures and disasters.
Regardless of their cause, unaccounted risks or inadequate planning and controls can be very damaging. When organizations fail to prioritize the right activities in their risk management approach, several issues can emerge:
Lack of Continuity: Frequent workplace changes may lead to the creation of new activities while overlooking existing, more effective measures.
Lack of Coordination: Without clear connections between activities and specific risks, teams may end up working in silos, duplicating efforts instead of collaborating across departments.
Activity Fatigue: Staff can become overwhelmed and start ignoring certain activities simply due to a lack of time or clarity on their importance.
Wasted Resources: As risks evolve, organizations often lack a system to understand how these changes should impact ongoing activities or the allocation of resources.
Activity Obsolescence: In a dynamic environment, it's easy for some activities to become outdated, yet remain unnoticed and unaddressed.
Lack of Prioritization: When activities are chosen on an ad hoc basis, decisions may be driven by the urgency of the moment or individual preferences, rather than by an informed assessment of risk.
By failing to properly identify, assess, and prioritize risks, organizations not only expose themselves to threats but also risk wasting valuable time and resources.
In this article we are going to look at information technology focused risk assessments and how to perform them.
What Is an Information Security Risk Assessment?
IT risk assessments in general involve three factors: the importance of the assets at risk, how critical the threat is, and how vulnerable the system is to that threat. By understanding these three factors, businesses can assess risks in terms of their likelihood and impact, or use whichever risk model you have chosen.
In the context of information security, risk assessments are performed to allow organizations to assess, identify and modify security measures, and to enable management and operations to view the entire organization from the perspective of an external attacker or threat. Taking this point of view, teams can prioritize threats and assign resources to implement an appropriate solution or strategy, relative to the scope of the risk.
Understanding Risk Metrics Reports
A risk metrics report is an essential tool for visualizing and communicating the health of an organization’s risk management efforts. By compiling key risk indicators (KRIs), these reports provide management and stakeholders with a centralized view of current risks, ongoing trends, and areas of concern.
Why does this matter? In practice, risk metrics reports allow organizations to:
Identify changes in risk exposure before they become major issues.
Track the effectiveness of controls and mitigation strategies over time.
Facilitate informed decision-making by giving leadership objective, easy-to-understand data.
Demonstrate due diligence to regulators, investors, and auditors.
Ultimately, these reports help transform the abstract concept of “risk” into actionable insights, supporting a proactive, and not just reactive, approach to enterprise security and resilience.
Real-World Risk Assessment in Action
Consider a common corporate scenario: when a company applies for professional liability insurance. Insurers will often request details about your organization's operational controls, data protection measures, employee access protocols, and backup strategies. This process isn't just paperwork it's a practical example of assessing and demonstrating how your company manages potential risks.
On a broader scale, the importance of robust risk assessments becomes evident when looking at high-profile failures. For instance, widespread food safety breaches in the restaurant industry and prolonged banking outages due to technology mishaps have made headlines and damaged public trust. In both cases, comprehensive risk assessments could have helped those organizations identify vulnerabilities and prioritize preventive controls before issues escalated.
The Importance of Aligning Risks with Strategic Objectives
Risks aren’t isolated threats floating around your organization, they’re directly tied to the bigger picture of your company’s mission and objectives. By mapping risks to strategic goals, businesses ensure their risk management efforts are not just reactive firefighting, but proactive enablers of long-term success.
Here’s why this connection matters:
Sharper Prioritization: When risks are linked to business objectives, you can quickly determine which threats have the potential to derail what matters most. This allows for a smarter allocation of resources, ensuring that your mitigation efforts have the greatest possible impact.
Clearer Decision Making: Seeing risks through the lens of your organization’s goals helps management make informed choices that balance short-term fixes with a longer term strategy that creates better decision making.
Enhanced Agility: Organizations that integrate risk management with business planning are better positioned to respond swiftly to change. Whether that means new competitors, shifting regulations, or evolving cyber threats.
Holistic Perspective: By relating risks to your overarching mission, teams throughout the organization, from IT to legal to operations can work from a shared understanding,. This reduces those infamous silos that slow down progress.
Ultimately, connecting risks to strategic goals acts as a compass, keeping your company on its intended path even when storms arise.
Who Should Perform Risk Assessments & Why?
Conducting risk assessments can be beneficial for any company regardless of size. When it comes to information technology there is an increase of businesses with digital assets or that handle sensitive data. Which inevitably, are prone to cyberattacks and other security risks. Many technology companies are compliant with at least one or more information security standard, such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 or the GDPR and CCPA. Many of which recommend and often require risk assessments as part of the compliance process.
These assessments form the basis of your mitigating strategy and are critical to the foundation of security control measures and formulating a response plan. A response plan is a documented process or set of procedures to execute a business' recovery processes to secure and protect a business' IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. As a business performs more risk assessments, it's mitigating security controls will mature and a develop an increasingly comprehensive response plan. While some organizations are well prepared for times of crisis, others have had to strategize on the go.
There are several general factors for businesses to consider in the decision to conduct a security risk assessment:
Productivity: Productivity of IT, security and audit personnel can increase due to improvements to review systems, security knowledge and processes.
Responsibility: Responsibility for security should extend to management, with management making decisions at an organizational level and IT for specific requirements.
Self-analysis: The risk assessment system should be able to be used by anyone, not just IT or security specialists. This allows management to take ownership of security and security to become part of the culture.
Communication: An assessment takes data from all parts of an organization which improves communication of security information and decision making by management.
Additionally, risk assessments provide clarity on where time, money, and resources are being spent, making it easier to prioritize activities and address ambiguous or contentious issues. Since controls, tests, and mitigation strategies often require significant investment, risk assessments bring much-needed prioritization, helping employees and leadership understand the criticality of each activity.
By applying a risk-based approach, organizations can streamline existing efforts, manage change more efficiently, escalate issues with objectivity, and gain a holistic view of various controls and testing processes. The result is a shift from mere check-the-box compliance toward proactive risk management helping to prevent loss events and identify emerging threats before they materialize.
The Importance of Standardizing Scales and Criteria
A crucial aspect of any risk assessment is ensuring consistency in how risks are evaluated and communicated. Imagine a scenario where one team rates a threat as "critical" while another team sees the same issue as "moderate", misalignment is sure to follow. Without standardization, ratings become subjective and difficult to compare across the organization, much like two people debating whether a movie deserves seven or nine out of ten stars.
By defining clear, objective criteria for rating both the likelihood and impact of risks, organizations build a shared language for decision-making. For example, aligning teams on what constitutes “high,” “medium,” or “low” severity, backed up by both qualitative descriptions and quantitative thresholds prevents confusion and ensures all stakeholders work from the same playbook.
Templates with specific definitions for each rating category not only streamline the assessment process, but also improve transparency. This uniform approach supports better cross-functional communication, more accurate reporting, and a stronger foundation for prioritizing remediation efforts. Ultimately, a standardized scoring system transforms risk assessment from an art into more of a science, lending credibility and reproducibility to your process.
Steps to Conduct a Risk Assessment
While the depth of assessment depends on business size and assets, information security risk assessments generally consists of these steps:
Determine Information Value: Identifying business-critical assets allows security resources to be prioritized.
Identify and Prioritize: Determine the scope of the assessment by identifying and prioritizing assets that will be included in the assessment. A business may not want to assess every building, employee, electronic data, and piece of equipment as not all assets have the same value.
Identify Threats: Threats include any vulnerability that could be exploited to breach security or use data in a way that harms the business. Threats may be related to IT security like hackers or viruses, or other factors.
Identify Vulnerabilities: A vulnerability is a weakness that a threat can exploit, breach or use data in a way that harms the business. Analysis, audits, databases, and other sources can be used to find vulnerabilities.
Analyze and Improve Controls: Review existing implemented security controls and mitigating process to identify improvements. Risk related security controls are either preventative that prevent attacks, or detective that discover attacks.
Calculate the Likelihood and Impact of Scenarios: Identify how likely cyber risks are to occur and what the impact would be. This allows investment in security to be prioritized.
Why Choose a 1–10 Risk Assessment Scale?When it comes to assessing and prioritizing risks, the traditional high-medium-low scale can be deceptively simple but quickly becomes limiting. With just three broad categories to choose from, employees may struggle to categorize nuances or may default to the middle ground to play it safe. This often results in risk assessments that are ambiguous and less useful for making informed decisions.
A matrix scale, on the other hand, offers much more precision and clarity. By providing a wider range of options, stakeholders can more accurately reflect the severity of risks and their potential impact on the organization. This not only boosts confidence in how risks are ranked, but it also enables more meaningful aggregation and comparison across different risk scenarios. Ultimately, a granular scale transforms subjective judgments into actionable data, making it easier for management to clearly see which risks require immediate attention and resources.
Prioritize Risks based on Cost of Prevention and Information Value: Determine the level of risk and actions that can be taken to mitigate the risk. If an asset costs more to protect that its value and it is non-critical to the business, it may not be worth the investment to protect.
Document Results: The last step is to document the results to support management decisions on budget, policies, and procedure. Each threat should be reported by risk, vulnerabilities and value, and the likelihood of occurrence and potential impact.
Information security risk assessments are important and can benefit businesses that deal with sensitive data or operate under compliance standards. The many benefits include identifying security risks, improvements to productivity, communication and prioritizing your information security investments. Completing a thorough assessment can be a lengthy processes and tool such as GRC solutions can be used to optimize them from start to finish.
Enhancing Your Risk Assessment: Best Practices
To get the most out of your risk assessment methodology, consider weaving in a few best practices that can elevate your program from routine to robust:
Dig for the Root Cause: Look beyond surface-level problems and identify why an event could occur. Understanding the root cause offers deeper insight into vulnerabilities and helps direct meaningful mitigation efforts.
Standardize Your Approach: Use clear templates and defined criteria for evaluating risks. For example, if using a scale (such as 1-10), ensure everyone understands what each value represents. This prevents confusion where one person’s “high” might be another’s “medium.” Be sure to express risk in both quantitative and qualitative terms for consistency.
Link Risks Directly to Controls: As you identify risks, make it a practice to map them directly to the controls in place. This documentation not only strengthens your governance but also provides valuable evidence for auditors and stakeholders, showcasing the steps you’ve taken to mitigate specific risks.
Tie Assessments to Strategic Goals: Risk isn’t just about IT or compliance, it connects findings to broader business objectives. By aligning risk assessments with your company’s strategic priorities, you ensure resources are allocated where they matter most.
Make Risk Everyone’s Business: Embedding risk assessment into everyday activities rather than treating it as an annual checkbox builds a stronger security culture. Encourage teams to share successes and lessons learned, keeping risk management visible and relevant across the organization.
By combining these structured steps with best practices, your risk assessment will not only meet compliance requirements but also drive better decision-making, communication, and productivity across your business.
Assessing & Planning With GRC Tools
While organizations can track risks manually using spreadsheets, this approach quickly becomes inefficient and error-prone as risk environments grow more complex. Today, dedicated risk management and GRC software make it easier than ever to centralize, automate, and strengthen the risk assessment process.
GRC software enhances collaboration and ensures risk assessments are not just completed, but continuously updated to reflect changing conditions. Instead of siloed or one-off efforts, these platforms create a single source of truth for managing controls, monitoring threats, and reporting results.
Key advantages of using GRC tools for risk assessments include:
Efficiency & Time Savings – Pre-built frameworks and libraries allow businesses to quickly apply existing controls and assets directly into assessments.
Visibility & Centralization – Risks, controls, and vulnerabilities are managed from one platform, reducing gaps and inconsistencies.
Proactive Monitoring – Integrated monitoring capabilities flag emerging threats in real time, enabling faster responses before they escalate.
Customizable Risk Models – Organizations can apply built-in best-practice methodologies or customize scoring to fit their unique needs.
Audit-Ready Reporting – Automated reporting ensures stakeholders, regulators, and auditors receive consistent, reliable data.
By leveraging GRC tools, companies gain the ability to not only identify risks but also align them with security controls, compliance requirements, and strategic objectives. This transforms risk assessments from a reactive checklist exercise into a dynamic, value-driven process that strengthens resilience.
Conclusion: GRC as a Strategic Enabler
Businesses cannot afford to approach risk assessments as a one-time exercise or compliance checkbox. Whether it’s cyber threats, operational failures, or regulatory scrutiny, risks are evolving too quickly for outdated, manual approaches.
By adopting a structured, technology-enabled approach through GRC, organizations can:
Standardize processes and remove ambiguity in how risks are measured and managed.
Enhance collaboration across teams and departments by working from a unified framework.
Improve decision-making with clear, real-time data on vulnerabilities and control effectiveness.
Strengthen resilience by aligning risks with strategic objectives and ensuring that critical assets are prioritized.
Ultimately, GRC is not just about minimizing threats, it builds a foundation for trust, transparency, and long-term business success. Companies that embed GRC into their culture and strategy are better equipped to anticipate challenges, seize opportunities, and thrive in a dynamic environment.
