What is a Risk Assessment in Information Security?


Information security risk assessment is an essential part of enterprises management practices that provides to identify, quantify, and prioritize risks against element for risk acceptance and goals relevant to the organization.

Risk management defines a process that includes identification, management, and elimination or reduction of the likelihood of events that can negatively influence the resources of the information system to decrease security risks that potentially have the ability to affect the information system, subject to an acceptable value of protection defines that include a risk analysis, analysis of the “cost-effectiveness” parameter, and selection, construction, and testing of the security subsystem, and the study of all elements of security.

A Security Risk Assessment (or SRA) is an assessment that contains recognizing the risks in the company, the technology and the processes to check that controls are in place to safeguard against security threats. Security risk assessments are generally required by compliance standards, including PCI-DSS standards for payment card security.

Security Risk Assessments are implemented by a security assessor who will compute all elements of the companies systems to recognize areas of risk. These can be as simple as a system that enables weak passwords, or can be more complex problems, including insecure business processes. The assessor will generally review everything from HR policies to firewall configurations while working to recognize potential risks.

For example, during the discovery phase an assessor will recognize all databases containing any sensitive data, an asset. That database is linked to the internet, a vulnerability. It can protect that asset, it is required to have a control in place, and in this case it would be a firewall.

A Security Risk Assessment identifies some critical assets, vulnerabilities and controls in the company to provide that some risks have been properly mitigated. A Security Risk Assessment is important in protecting the company from security risks.

A security risk assessment supports us with the blueprint of risks that exist in the environment and provides vital information about how critical each issue is. It can be understanding where to start when enhancing the security that allows us to maximize your IT resources and budget, saving time and money.

Security Risk Assessments are deep dive computation of the company, or it can be a definite IT project or even a company department. During the assessment, the objective is to find problems and security holes before the bad guys do.

The assessment process must review and test systems and people, viewing for weaknesses. As they are discovered, they are ranked based on how big of a risk they are to the company. The resulting document will recognize systems that are operating well and properly secured, and those that have problems. A security risk assessment will generally have definite technical results, such as network scanning results or firewall configuration results.

Updated on: 03-Mar-2022

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