After a Hurricane Comes a Rainbow … of Threats

At the time of writing this, the city I now call home has mostly recovered from the aftermath of vegetation and roof debris left behind by Hurricane Ian’s path of destruction. Although minor damage compared to those residing in Ft. Myers, FL, the Sarasota area experienced wind gusts of over 100 mph, flooding in major roadways and power outages for up to a week or more.

What Does Hurricane Ian Have to Do With Cybersecurity Anyway?

Well, tropical storms, hurricanes and other natural disasters are threats that can wreak havoc on business operations, data centers and your organization’s infrastructure. Wherever you may live or work, physical threats exist in the form of wildfires, droughts, mudslides, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods to name just a few. And, all too often, bad actors tend to prey on individual victims and organizations left vulnerable by a natural disaster or any other threat.

Basically, cybercriminals don’t care how your organization became easier to attack, just that you are easier to attack.

What You Can Do Now to Protect Your Organization From Cybercriminals

I bet that in some way you have probably worried about how your organization will respond to looming threats in an increasingly complex threat landscape. Along with those concerns, I’m sure you’ve dealt with, or are dealing with, resource constraints such as limited staff, inadequate security tools or small budgets.

A great first step is to shift from a compliance-centric approach to a risk-centric approach. In addition to not caring about how you became vulnerable, bad actors also don’t care if you’re compliant or not. Complying with regulatory requirements and standards is important of course, but once you begin focusing on risk management first, you’ll become compliant as a result.

Shift to a Risk-Centric Approach

Shifting to a more strategic, risk-centric approach requires a focus on the business objectives and the most pressing risks impacting your organization. The key to facilitating this mindset shift is through a programmatic approach that starts with your business objective. These business-centric programs can provide a single pane of glass around your risk and compliance activities focused on a business goal. With this mindset, you can quickly identify, measure and take action on critical risks while prioritizing them based on your risk appetite.

A Smarter Way to Manage Provider Risk

If you’ve followed recent news stories about security and data breaches, you already know how complex managing third-party provider risk can be. In fact, 44% of companies have had a third-party breach in the past year. Of those that had a breach, 38% had no way of knowing when or if an issue had arisen with a third party. ¹

But what if you could have insight into your provider risk by integrating your risk management platform with security rating tools that give you inherent risk scores with a click of a button? You could focus your due diligence efforts on the higher-risk providers based on key business objectives.

A Better Way to Communicate Risk

Communicating risk to leadership and across your organization requires visibility and detailed reporting. By using Cyber Assurance Programs from the RiskOptics ROAR Platform to organize compliance and risk posture, you can quickly identify the business priorities that need immediate attention and reduce the risk to acceptable levels. More detailed reporting helps Information Security teams direct resources where they are needed most to ensure the effectiveness of their controls.

How the RiskOptics ROAR Platform Can Help

Utilizing a modern risk management solution to identify and assess risks through the lens of your business goals can help give time back to your teams. By leveraging automated evidence collection, pre-seeded risk scores and integrations with security rating tools, you can focus on more strategic activities.

With the RiskOptics ROAR Platform, you can be up and running with a Cyber Assurance Program in a matter of minutes, not weeks or months. With a program on-boarding wizard comprised of a handful of questions about your business and the types of data that you deal with, ROAR makes setup a breeze.

Read the white paper Get Ahead of Threats by Surfacing Unknown Risks Lurking in Blind Spots to learn more!

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¹ David Breg, “Third-Party Cyber Risk Management Primer,” Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2022