To help you implement and maintain a strong risk management strategy for your organization, consider the following tips. They will help you align your risk management program with your overall security program so that you can minimize overall risk with ease.

1. Develop and implement a program. A risk management program is critical to achieving the intended goals of an organization’s risk management strategy. Program implementation should align with other defined security program goals. The lack of a risk management program may lead to ineffective implementation of an organization’s risk management strategy. Risk management control assignment, accountability, and continuous management are key to maintaining an effective program.
2. Frequently review and update. The risk management strategy should be reviewed and updated at least annually. More frequent reviews may be required to address changes to information systems, security control requirements or changes to the overall organization.
3. Solicit feedback and approval. Risk management processes should be established, managed, and agreed upon by appropriate stakeholders and individual control owners. Solicit feedback and approval for the risk management strategy from all appropriate stakeholders within your organization. This is not an IT-only exercise but should be an organization-wide exercise.
4. Perform risk assessments. Once organizations have developed a risk management strategy and program, regular risk assessments should be performed to identify, or update, a list of risk scenarios to which the organization may be susceptible. This process should result in the potential impact for each risk scenario being assessed. Annual risk assessments are not only a best practice, but they are also required by most regulatory control frameworks to validate that an organization routinely monitors applicable risks and applies appropriate risk treatment or mitigation.
5. Partner up. If it makes sense for your organization, you can partner with a reputable security provider that provides an effective way to manage and maintain risk assessments. This should include the management and tracking of remediation activities.
6. Treat and mitigate risk as needed. Organizations need to have defined processes in place for completing risk treatment and mitigation activities once a risk assessment has been completed. Without these processes, risks may be identified during risk assessments but never properly addressed or managed. Treatment and mitigation requirements need to be assigned to clearly defined owners to ensure that appropriate personnel are held accountable for addressing identified risks. If not, organizations may fall victim to one of the worst types of risk – one of which they are aware but do nothing to resolve.
7. Categorize security and frame risk. Security categories for an organization’s information systems need to be defined to enable appropriate risk decisions to be made. Without this, organizations could potentially expend resources to protect a lower-impact, lower-risk system instead of focusing attention on a higher-impact or higher-risk system. It’s important to protect all systems, but protection levels should be based on the level of risk defined for information systems.

Your organization should ensure that a comprehensive risk management strategy is developed and implemented consistently across the organization. This is necessary to manage security risks to operations, information assets, individuals, and other organizations associated with the operation or use of your internal information systems. If applicable, the risk management strategy should also address privacy risks to individuals resulting from the collection, sharing, storing, transmission, use, and disposal of personally identifiable information. By developing a risk management strategy and building a comprehensive risk management program, supported by all organizational stakeholders, you’ll ensure that your organization can avoid key risk pitfalls for effective overall security.

Bryon Miller is co-founder and CISO at ASCENT Portal, a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for comprehensive security and compliance management. An expert in security and compliance best practices, Miller is also the author of the book, “100 Security Program Pitfalls and Prescriptions to Avoid Them,” available on Amazon.

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“Managing security and compliance can be a tedious and complex task, which has been further complicated by a flood of single, point products,” said Bryon Miller, CISO and Hosted Portal Lead, ASCENT. “With the ASCENT Security Compliance Portal, organizations can automate their security processes while gaining a single source of compliance truth for visibility into achievements and gaps across leading security frameworks. In a single cloud-based platform, security and compliance teams now have everything they need to manage compliance readiness.”

The new ASCENT Security Compliance Portal automates security program processes, including assessments, policies, plans, and incident response, end-to-end. The new portal also features capabilities for complete vendor management and artifact storage so that companies can simplify their adherence to leading compliance frameworks while retaining regulatory proof to simplify auditing response. Key features of the portal include:

• Security Assessments. Providing the real-time status for any control framework, or multiple control frameworks, ASCENT security assessments provide complete, continuous monitoring of controls to ensure assessments are always current.
• Security and Compliance Calendar. Featuring automated email reminders to control owners, the security and compliance calendar proactively manages and monitors control tasks so last-minute data collection is avoided.
• Risk Assessments. ASCENT provides annual risk assessments for natural, man-made, business, and IT risks, to ensure appropriate mitigation steps can be performed. Once completed, it’s easy to maintain changes and report on real-time status to ensure the risk assessments are current.
• Complete Vendor Management. ASCENT simplifies vendor management processes, automating vendor due diligence assessments where vendors are notified of the need to complete their risk assessment directly within the portal. Vendor contract management features also monitor, manage and alert on renewals and expirations.
• Automated and On-Demand Reporting. ASCENT provides automated weekly reporting and offers customizable on-demand reporting across critical compliance areas including security assessments, security awareness training, outstanding compliance tasks and more.

ASCENT Security Compliance Portal is a multi-tenant solution that offers out-of-the-box compliance framework processes for CIS Top 20, Cybersecurity Assessment Tool (CAT), Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), FedRAMP, FFIEC, GDPR, HIPAA/HITECH/HITRUST CSF, ISO 27001/27002, NIST (FISMA), PCI-DSS and over 30 additional industry-standard frameworks. The solution is ideal for regulated industries, including financial services, DoD contractors and suppliers, healthcare organizations, law firms and auditing firms as well as the managed services providers (MSPs) that support them to ensure security and compliance practices for their customers.

“GiaSpace has been performing network audits as one-offs for many years, but we were missing a portal that we could use to deliver our Compliance as a Service,” said Robert Giannini, Strategic Technology Consultant, GiaSpace, a managed IT and security services provider. “When the DoD ramped up the intro of CMMC, we put forth a lot of searching for a system that we could use to manage NIST, CMMC, and HIPAA audits. After our initial trial and error, we found the ASCENT Portal. Today we use the ASCENT Portal to manage several multi-tenant audits and the required supporting documentation. I strongly feel this is a system that is going to streamline our efforts in getting DoD contractors CMMC certified and manage those findings in a secure system.”

Available now, the SaaS-based ASCENT Security Compliance Portal pricing starts at $4,800 annually. For more information, visit: www.ascent-portal.com.

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