How To Add Financial Figures to Risk Assessment for Cyber Security
Within the last 2 years cyber threats have grown considerably, both in complexity and tenacity. In such a hostile environment full of ransomware, phishing attacks and malicious software targeting remote and in-house systems, it’s important to continuously invest in identification and mitigation of such threats.
With cyber risk quantification it’s easier to present these threats to decision-makers, ensuring proper measures are taken and necessary budgets are approved.
Why is quantification important?
By adding financial figures to risk assessment we are getting a more accurate picture on which threat presents a higher risk for our business.
For example, a compromised database containing personally identifiable information poses a high risk for your business due to IT regulations such as GDPR. Even if the compromised information are just names and e-mail addresses, due to GDPR your company may face fines up to 20 million Euros or 4% of annual revenue, which is something most companies would have a hard time recovering from.
As well as this, working out the probability of the threat isn’t helpful when making decisions. You could have a high chance of a threat that has very minimal impact to your business so you wouldn’t pay a lot of money to mitigate it. Likewise, a threat with a medium to low chance that could wipe your business out is something to pay attention to.
By adding financials to cyber risk assessment we can:
- Identify the biggest threats on the company
- See how technology issues affect users in a company
- Present the financial impact of “downtime” on salaries and sales
- See the impact of IT regulations
- Speed up decision-making process
Cyber risk quantification made simple
By using Boardish, financial risk assessment for cyber security is a simple task. You can easily quantify the cost of a threat to your company.
Plus, you can then work out the financial sales loss, market position loss, regulation financial implication and salary loss to your risk assessment, as well as how efficient your solutions are (and the exposure you’re leaving.)
You can enter several ways to mitigate a single threat and show how cost-effective each solution is. It is much easier to do proper calculations when you put everything in financials which is why Boardish is such a helpful tool.
With this approach to financial risk assessment for cyber security you create a deeper picture that shows the real financial impact of cyber security on the business. Speaking in financials also improves communication with the board and helps with easier and faster decision-making. Your budget is more likely to get approved when you make complex IT solutions accessible by communicating them in financial terms.
TheBoardishTeam
