What are the Top Ways to Reduce Cyber Risks?
Category: News
Published: 2nd January 2025
Reducing cyber security risks is critical as organisations rely heavily on technology and data for daily operations. From ransomware attacks to data breaches, the risks are numerous and potentially devastating for businesses. This flurry of unique risks has pushed cyber security to the forefront of the business risk register.
Currently, most businesses underplay the importance cyber risk because it is misunderstood or ignored. Only 21% allocate cyber budget to the top risks of the organisation. Despite heightened concerns about cyber risk, only 2% of the executives say their company has implemented cyber resilience actions across their organisation in all areas surveyed.
However, cyber security breaches create the potential for financial loss, operational disruption, and reputational damage. These can be caused by threats like malware, ransomware, phishing, insider threats, and/or system vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is critical to understand how much these will cost your business to accurately estimate how much should be invested into cyber security.
Operational risk factors
Understanding cyber security as a business risk is necessary to ensure optimal operations. Data loss or unavailability, system down time, and reputational damage are all areas which can significantly impact operational ability, and consequently, business revenue.
To evaluate how these may impact an organisation, regular cyber security risk assessments should be conducted. This process identifies, evaluates, and prioritises potential vulnerabilities and access points to an organisation’s networks. This provides businesses the foresight to mitigate risks and secure their networks as best as possible. It also allows organisations to estimate the likelihood of occurrence and measure the potential damage should they suffer a breach.
Cyber risk management
Increasingly business leaders are implementing and planning cyber risk management strategies to ensure that businesses are aware of potential vulnerabilities. This includes creating an incident response plan to manage breaches effectively and conducting risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities. These can be conducted via risk assessment tools, vulnerability scanning tools, incident response tools and monitoring solutions.
Enforcing cyber security best practices is essential, for example multi-factor authentication (MFA), patching updates, and/or data encryption. These are minimum standards which should be regularly maintained to reduce the likelihood of a breach.
Additional easy ways to reduce cyber risks include always utilising strong passwords and repeated security awareness testing and training.
Managing cyber risks involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential threats to an organisation’s digital assets. Based on the analysis of risk, mitigations can be tailored to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance an organisation’s resilience against cyber threats.
Risk management exists to help businesses create forward thinking plans in a deliberate, responsible and effective manner. The information collated when creating these plans is analysed and translated to make decision making as simple as possible.
The changing cyber landscape has increased the efforts into assessing IT and cyber risk. For example, 72% of organisations have increased their risk management investment in AI governance.
Cyber risk mitigation
Risk mitigation is essential for reducing the likelihood and/or impact of a cyber threat. This is done via the implementation of controls, tools, or strategies includes firewalls, multi-factor authentication, and regular patching of vulnerabilities. SMEs should establish and maintain a comprehensive incident response plan (IRP) tailored to their operational context.
This plan should outline clear escalation paths, roles and responsibilities, and pre-defined actions to contain and recover from an incident. A business continuity plan must also be created. This is part of the increasing recognition that there needs to be the same processes to manage all types of risk.
Cyber hygiene is increasingly important as regulations and compliance are becoming stricter. This includes regularly updating your devices to ensure they are properly protected against known vulnerabilities. Additionally, you should regularly backup critical data to mitigate ransomware risks. This cyber hygiene even extends to the public, as it is paramount to educating everyone about the emerging cyber risks and how to handle them.
Conclusion
In an era where cyber threats are constantly evolving, a robust risk management and mitigation strategy is now a necessity for SMEs. By understanding the principles of cyber security risk management and implementing a personalised approach, you can significantly enhance your organisation’s resilience against cyber threats.
It is vital to stay informed about emerging threats, regularly review and update strategies, and don’t hesitate to seek expert advice when needed. A proactive approach saves organisations from potentially catastrophic consequences.