How risk assessment software protects your company

Consistent risk assessment depends on repeatable compliance workflows. Here is how Tallyfy helps organizations manage risk through structured processes.

When you own your own business, it’s essential to make sure that it’s secure and free from potential risks. Audit processes appear in about 470 of our customer discussions at Tallyfy, and this is often underestimated. In our experience with enterprise companies running supplier security assessments, the hardest part is not identifying risks - it is ensuring the assessment process itself is followed consistently across potentially thousands of suppliers. These risks can come from a variety of sources from employees and customers to competitors and cyber attacks.

Other risks come when you decide to make investments in new business-related expenses. All of these expenses need to be evaluated for the risks involved to make sure that you will come out a winner - which is where risk assessment software comes in.

Last year, IDG detected 38 percent more cybersecurity incidents than the year prior.

— Bill Laberis (Source)

Information security risk assessment software helps your company create a protocol to check for risks in the most sensitive areas where problems might arise. This information risk assessment software provides the means to make periodic checks on your information and other systems to ensure that nothing has changed and that your possible risk has not grown.

Keeping your business healthy and growing is your main goal and information risk assessment software can aid you in that effort. Here is how it works.

Identify information, who controls it, and who benefits from it

It’s hard to access the risk to something if you’re not exactly sure what it is. Information risk assessment software can help you identify the information that is most at risk in your company, and then you can come up with a plan to protect it more easily.

Part of this assessment from your information risk assessment software should identify who is responsible for creating the information and organizing it. These will be the people who make the changes to tighten any security if the information risk assessment software finds an issue.

Another issue in this initial step is to find out who benefits from the information or asset. The information risk assessment software will help to identify all of these things.

What happens if the information were compromised

The next step in determining the risk to your information and company is to determine what would happen if the information was compromised. The information risk assessment software looks at what the long-term effect would be if the information were to leak to determine how detrimental it would be to the health of your company.

It could be that the information risk assessment software finds that the information is not as important to your company as you thought that it was while identifying other items more important.

Knowing the long-term effects of a breach of information can help you decide how much you are or are not willing to do to protect that information from the current risk. While the information risk assessment software suggests the possible outcome, you will not know until it actually happens.

Identify possible threats by doing risk assessment

You cannot protect something until you have an understanding of what the threats are to it. Information risk assessment software helps to identify those threats. Threats to information at your company can come from within the company or someone outside of it. To get the best idea of the potential threats, use the information risk assessment software as an aid.

It’s possible that your company allows too many employees to access a piece of information placing it at risk. The information risk assessment software might identify a specific group of employees or departments that do not really need access or who should have limited access to stricter controls.

You want to make sure that you use your information risk assessment software to continually identify possible threats to your most essential company information.

Look at possible weak points within risk assessment software

Once your information risk assessment software has identified areas of concerns, it’s up to your company to take a long hard look at any weak points that the system has identified. Although your information risk assessment software looks at information and figures to make a determination, it’s impossible for the software to see the actual flow.

To keep your company protected and growing, you want to examine the identified areas and check each step of the current process to ensure that the information identified by the information risk assessment software is actually at risk.

From there, it’s up to you to make changes to shore up those risks.

Based on hundreds of implementations, we have observed that pharmaceutical companies and financial services firms often discover their biggest risk is not external threats but internal process gaps - vendors slipping through approval workflows without proper cybersecurity evaluation, or data access controls that exist on paper but are not enforced in practice.

While investigating the weak points, you want to try and determine the likelihood that the person or group identified by the information risk assessment software could actually access the information. It’s possible that the information risk assessment software sees a possibility that isn’t really practical in reality.

Examine the controls that protect the information

When the information risk assessment software identifies a possible weak point, it also needs to examine the controls that you already have in place to protect that information. This can include items, such as who has access to the items, how you determine if someone who does not have access has seen the information and any encryption in place.

The information risk assessment software examines the types of protocol that you have in place for weaknesses in the controls. You might need to add additional controls to further protect your company’s essential information.

With information risk assessment software, you can get a real assessment of whether or not your current controls are enough to protect your company secrets. Once you have implemented new controls, you will need your information risk assessment software to examine the new controls in the same manner.

Is the threat real?

After the information risk assessment software identifies the threat and examines the controls in place, it is time for your company to decide if the threat is real. At this point, you can benefit from creating pretend scenarios.

You can select a possible threat and pretend like it is trying to access your information. You need to carefully examine what roadblocks stand in the person’s way and if they are enough to block them from accessing it.

Your information risk assessment software helps you work out these scenarios. It’s essential that your company is making changes only when the possibility of a problem is real. You don’t want to waste money and resources if the threat is highly unlikely of ever occurring.

Determine the residual risk

After your information risk assessment software finds a weak area, you need to determine exactly how bad it would be if that information were compromised. You need to take a look at the long-term effects if a piece of information was known to the outside world.

In some cases, information probably isn’t as essential as time goes by. Priorities shift more often than most organizations realize.

For instance, you might need to heavily guard information about an upcoming new product line, but once the line is launched, you don’t need to protect it as much or even at all. Your information risk assessment software can help you decide where to add additional barriers as well as when it is no longer essential.

Security and vendor assessment workflow templates

Example Procedure

Firewall and Security

1Set up system and security settings

2Select program features

3Choose firewall settings for different network location types

4Document current security posture

5Define access requirements

+3 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Preferred Vendor Evaluation and Approval Workflow

1Audit current vendor inventory and active contracts

2Categorize vendors by spend volume and business risk

3Define vendor qualification and approval criteria

4Evaluate and score vendor candidates

5Publish approved vendor list and train employees

+1 more steps

View template