What is a Risk-based Cybersecurity Strategy?

The security of your IT infrastructure is a vital component in ensuring that you have a sound system. You must devise a strategy for dealing with various threats both inside and outside your business. A maturity-based model and a risk-based strategy are the two main approaches that companies adopt for their IT security.

A maturity-based model involves monitoring everything constantly. The organization tends to apply a similar degree of monitoring and control to every asset that it owns. Unfortunately, it gets very expensive as the business grows.

What is a Risk-Based Approach?

A risk-based approach is a systematic approach that seeks to identify, evaluate and prioritize threats that the organization faces. Unlike the maturity-based approach that we discussed above, the risk-based alternative enables the organization to tailor its security program to meet specific threats and deal with several vulnerabilities.

As a result, risk-based vulnerability management is becoming more crucial in the current IT security strategy. Rootshell Security handles vulnerability lifecycle using the vendor-agnostic Prism Platform more efficiently. They designed the Prism Platform to integrate the findings of third-party pen-testing, red teaming, and scanning technologies, rendering tedious cyber threat management processes obsolete and transforming static data into actionable insights.

There are five distinct phases of the risk-based security management approach. Here is a quick look at each phase and its value to the overall security program.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

The BIA phase involves identifying and documenting those critical business processes and any others that depend on them. Then, the assessors rank the process with their criticality. The list of dependencies includes both technical and non-technical factors. Therefore, it may include personnel, data, applications, and facilities.

This phase enables you to determine the processes that require the utmost security as they would impact your business continuity in case of a threat. Besides, a deep understanding of the operating environment helps in creating a solid plan to manage its security.

Risk Assessment

This phase does a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the process to identify vulnerabilities, threats, and any regulatory requirements that apply to the business processes and their dependencies that you identified in the step above. Then calculate the extent of the damage if any of these risks become real.

This gives the implementing team a great opportunity to understand risks and prioritize the ones that are likely to cause the greatest damage to the business. This ranking helps in creating personalized approaches to specific issues that the organization is facing. Furthermore, the organization is able to obtain the necessary resources to deal with each risk.

Identify and Implement the Required Controls

Once you have prioritized the risks, you now identify, customize and assign controls that help to mitigate the risks. A control is any statement that provides the instructions required to minimize or mitigate the security risk. Some of such security control frameworks include HITRUST CSF, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, and ISO 27001/27002. All these prepackaged controls that you can customize according to the risks that you are facing.

Unlike the maturity-based model, you can have different controls implemented to different degrees to take care of various risks. It is also possible to do a cost-risk analysis and use the controls that provide the biggest benefit at the lowest cost.

Testing and Validation Phase

You need to validate your security controls after you have implemented them. This enables the organization to determine if they have adequate measures should a real threat happen. Some of the tests that you can carry out on the security controls include penetration tests, additional risk assessments, business continuity exercises, SAP audits, vulnerability management tests, and compliance control evaluations.

Testing gives you the confidence that the controls are providing the required security. If you test regularly, you will be able to identify gaps and add better and newer security controls. Progressive testing and improving the controls may eventually make some risks less likely to cause devastating damage to your systems.

Continuous Monitoring

This phase is similar to maturity-based monitoring in that they both involve non-stop monitoring of your assets for likely threats. This phase combines all the four above-mentioned phases into a repeatable process. It ensures that new threats are identified and remedies sought before the process is repeated. This way, the business processes are not vulnerable to threats.

In the course of repeating all the phases, the organization is able to determine which controls were not properly implemented or risks that were not properly implemented. This way, it is able to cover all the vulnerabilities.

A risk-based security approach is way cheaper than the alternatives and provides customized solutions to specific threats. This makes it effective in mitigating different risks.