Risk Management: The 4 Keys to Building a Resilient Business

While businesses focus on maintaining daily operations and increasing profits, they also need to be able to limit disruptions that may slow them down along the way. Unfortunately, no one can predict the future or see what is around the corner, so resilience and agility are key to staying in business. This requires effective risk management.

Effective risk strategies pave the way for businesses, providing stakeholders with assurance that daily operations will continue, but also confidence that they are prepared for future obstacles. And so, risk management should be a priority conversation in any boardroom.

Everyday business leaders make decisions and trade-offs, but the challenge in cyber risk management is striking the right balance between security, speed and cost. So how can we enable our leadership team to find the best balance?

Our experience says there are 4 keys to building a holistic risk management strategy aimed at creating a resilient business that you need to consider:

1 – Centralize

In a perfect world, we would have access to all the risk information we need, when we need it. In reality, essential data tends to be spread across various systems and presented in various forms that require heavy analysis and interpretation. By centralizing all risk management data across the business, it becomes possible to have visibility into risk status and also identify potential issues. A centralized approach increases consistency, efficiency and effectiveness of risk management.

2 – Automate

Organizations have become highly complex so manually identifying and addressing cyber security risks can be time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to error. Instead, organizations should automate where possible to increase the accuracy of the data, reduce the likelihood of human-error and increase productivity of the employees.

3 – Quantify

It is no longer acceptable to simply identify risks and categorize them as low, medium or high. Business leaders need to understand the magnitude and frequency of risks so that they can prioritize effectively and make appropriate trade-off decisions. By quantifying risks, business leaders can decide what actions to take and how much they are willing to invest in order to reduce the risk.

4 – Report

Reporting isn’t about providing pretty pictures and vivid colours – nor is it about providing as much information as possible. The heart of a holistic cybersecurity strategy is about being able to communicate risk in meaningful and clear terms to support strategic decision-making.

To find out more, view our on-demand webinar: Transitioning from GRC: Creating Holistic Risk Management. This session featured, Alexandra Limbean, Senior Information Security Analyst at McKinsey. She shared her experience buying risk management solutions and the challenges she faced along the way.