Cyber Security Risk Analysis

Risk analysis refers to the review of risks associated with the particular action or event. The risk analysis is applied to information technology, projects, security issues and any other event where risks may be analysed based on a quantitative and qualitative basis. Risks are part of every IT project and business organizations. The analysis of risk should be occurred on a regular basis and be updated to identify new potential threats. The strategic risk analysis helps to minimize the future risk probability and damage.

Enterprise and organization used risk analysis:

• To anticipates and reduce the effect of harmful results occurred from adverse events.
• To plan for technology or equipment failure or loss from adverse events, both natural and human-caused.
• To evaluate whether the potential risks of a project are balanced in the decision process when evaluating to move forward with the project.
• To identify the impact of and prepare for changes in the enterprise environment.

Benefits of risk analysis

Every organization needs to understand about the risks associated with their information systems to effectively and efficiently protect their IT assets. Risk analysis can help an organization to improve their security in many ways. These are:

• Concerning financial and organizational impacts, it identifies, rate and compares the overall impact of risks related to the organization.
• It helps to identify gaps in information security and determine the next steps to eliminate the risks of security.
• It can also enhance the communication and decision-making processes related to information security.
• It improves security policies and procedures as well as develop cost-effective methods for implementing information security policies and procedures.
• It increases employee awareness about risks and security measures during the risk analysis process and understands the financial impacts of potential security risks.

Steps in the risk analysis process

The basic steps followed by a risk analysis process are:

Conduct a risk assessment survey:

Getting the input from management and department heads is critical to the risk assessment process. The risk assessment survey refers to begin documenting the specific risks or threats within each department.

Identify the risks:

This step is used to evaluate an IT system or other aspects of an organization to identify the risk related to software, hardware, data, and IT employees. It identifies the possible adverse events that could occur in an organization such as human error, flooding, fire, or earthquakes.

Analyse the risks:

Once the risks are evaluated and identified, the risk analysis process should analyse each risk that will occur, as well as determine the consequences linked with each risk. It also determines how they might affect the objectives of an IT project.

Develop a risk management plan:

After analysis of the Risk that provides an idea about which assets are valuable and which threats will probably affect the IT assets negatively, we would develop a plan for risk management to produce control recommendations that can be used to mitigate, transfer, accept or avoid the risk.

Implement the risk management plan:

The primary goal of this step is to implement the measures to remove or reduce the analyses risks. We can remove or reduce the risk from starting with the highest priority and resolve or at least mitigate each risk so that it is no longer a threat.

Monitor the risks:

This step is responsible for monitoring the security risk on a regular basis for identifying, treating and managing risks that should be an essential part of any risk analysis process.

Types of Risk Analysis

The essential number of distinct approaches related to risk analysis are:

Qualitative Risk Analysis

• The qualitative risk analysis process is a project management technique that prioritizes risk on the project by assigning the probability and impact number. Probability is something a risk event will occur whereas impact is the significance of the consequences of a risk event.
• The objective of qualitative risk analysis is to assess and evaluate the characteristics of individually identified risk and then prioritize them based on the agreed-upon characteristics.
• The assessing individual risk evaluates the probability that each risk will occur and effect on the project objectives. The categorizing risks will help in filtering them out.
• Qualitative analysis is used to determine the risk exposure of the project by multiplying the probability and impact.

Quantitative Risk Analysis

• The objectives of performing quantitative risk analysis process provide a numerical estimate of the overall effect of risk on the project objectives.
• It is used to evaluate the likelihood of success in achieving the project objectives and to estimate contingency reserve, usually applicable for time and cost.
• Quantitative analysis is not mandatory, especially for smaller projects. Quantitative risk analysis helps in calculating estimates of overall project risk which is the main focus.