Cyber threats waste your company’s resources, leading to lost revenue and other costly issues. The best way to counter these losses is through effective cybersecurity risk reduction.
However, implementing the proper cyber risk reduction measures can take time, especially with limited staff, time, and resources. To get started, use a risk-based approach to monitoring your vulnerabilities.
Increased Productivity
Productivity suffers when systems are down for too long, and a robust cyber risk reduction strategy helps keep things running smoothly. Even small, seemingly insignificant threats like viruses can slow down work and impact employee morale, leading to lost productivity. This is why focusing on cyber risk reduction is crucial for businesses that want to stay competitive.
A well-defined cybersecurity policy protects data and keeps employees engaged, motivating them to keep things running. Employees know they’re watching the information they need to do their jobs and that the company notices their efforts. This positive feedback is a great way to boost engagement levels, and it’s one of the many ways that increased security protects productivity.
The proliferation of Internet-connected devices has created an expansive attack surface for bad actors to work their way into corporate networks. No matter how impenetrable an organization’s defenses are, it is still possible for them to be compromised by a third-party vendor or supply chain member.
Moving from a maturity-based approach to risk-based monitoring can help organizations better understand their attack surfaces. Instead of trying to monitor everything, they can identify the applications that pose the most risk potential and prioritize them accordingly. This allows them to reduce the amount of monitoring they must do and focus more energy on the things that matter.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Providing a good customer experience is essential for any company, but this is especially true of companies that use technology to collect data and process financial transactions. Whether it’s data breaches, unplanned downtime, or other cybersecurity-related incidents, these problems cause significant revenue losses for businesses, and they can also harm brand reputation and lead to a loss of customer trust that can take years to repair.
A key challenge is estimating damage costs accurately to prioritize risk reduction efforts appropriately. The common practice of measuring cyber maturity according to program completion — such as a multifactor authentication initiative being 90 percent complete or a data-loss prevention (DLP) program being 30 percent complete – can result in an organization spending more than needed. This approach neglects to account for the fact that these programs have varying degrees of impact on enterprise risk and that the most effective control implementation can vary widely from one organization to another.
By leveraging a continuous monitoring capability, you can gain a complete and holistic view of all your assets across the attack surface, including DevOps systems, cloud environments, and operational technology systems. This enables you to discover, expose continuously, and remediate risks in your supply chain, including third-party vendors. Balbix lets you efficiently and constantly assess your vendor security postures, provide a near real-time view of all your assets, prioritize open vulnerabilities based on business risk, and alert you when the vendor’s security posture dips below pre-agreed risk thresholds.
Increased Reputation
In addition to the direct financial costs associated with cyber incidents, damaging a business’s reputation can be devastating. Customers will not return to a company that has been the victim of a data breach or other incident. This can lead to long-term loss of revenue that is hard to recover from.
Internal cyber risks are a significant threat to businesses of all sizes. These include unauthorized access to systems and data, disgruntled employees seeking revenge or looking to do other types of damage, and malware, ransomware, phishing, and more. Cyber risk reduction strategies help to identify vulnerabilities and other issues to prevent these threats from becoming a reality.
A robust cybersecurity risk mitigation program will identify the areas of your business most susceptible to attacks. You can then implement policies and procedures that will help your organization avoid downtown and prevent the loss of revenue from compromised data and systems. Taking the time for cyber risk reduction will give you confidence that you are doing all you can to protect your data and your client’s information. This will help build trust with your clients and increase the likelihood of them returning to your business and recommending it to others. Suppose you have residual cyber risk that cannot be fully mitigated. In that case, you can always consider obtaining cybersecurity insurance to shift the financial cost of recovering from a cyber incident onto a third party.
Increased Sales
As data breaches continue to damage brands, cost organizations customers, and make headlines worldwide, more people seek out businesses prioritizing security and have proven processes for protecting customer data. These companies can build trust, increase loyalty, and experience more sales.
The key to achieving these results is ensuring that your team understands the full scope of cyber risk and its potential impact on your business operations, products, reputation, and bottom line. This is achieved by adopting a risk-based cybersecurity approach, as NIST recommended.
A risk-based approach enables you to design and implement security control programs specific to your environment and aligned with business goals. It also allows you to focus on reducing risks and vulnerabilities with the most significant impact. This means you can stop worrying about “building the right controls everywhere” and instead focus on identifying the best defenses for your most critical assets.
To achieve a robust and effective cyber risk management program, investing in research is essential to understand how threat actors operate, their motivation, and how they attack different industries. It’s also important to inventory your business assets and identify all the ways that those assets can be compromised. By doing so, you can create a solid and transparent use case enabling your team to speak the business language to drive real problem-solving and deliver accurate results that impact the organization’s operational resilience.
