IT Risk Management
Can you risk not competing on IT risk?
Every company has IT risk. In fact, risk can and should be construed as a good thing – no risk, no reward. What matters is how quickly a company can accurately identify current and future risk vectors and respond to them. Risk management is becoming an increasingly important facet of how well a company executes, and companies that excel at it typically lead in their marketplaces. They compete using IT and turn risk into assets for competitive advantage.
So what distinguishes IT risk management leaders? These leaders anticipate change, not just react to it. They respond swiftly and effectively to changing:
- Regulations
- System configurations
- Security controls
- Business requirements
Organizations are facing tremendous pressure from mandates for IT “risk-level” assessments associated with Sarbanes-Oxley 404, PCI DSS, FISMA, and other regulations or mandates. The fundamental need involves knowing:
- The level of exposure associated with unauthorized use of an IT resource
- The relative priorities and mitigation plans for protecting an institution’s information assets
The challenge is in identifying which assets among the hundreds and even thousands deployed have sensitive information – personal, financial, proprietary, or other – that requires controls for protection. Email surveys with spreadsheet attachments typically cannot handle the large number of variables involved in these assessments including:
- Who in IT operations is responsible for the asset?
- What questions do they need to answer?
- How should the answers be evaluated objectively to establish relative criticality among assets?
- Which controls should apply to adequately protect the asset?
- How much risk is involved should the control fail?
For many organizations, properly addressing these questions for hundreds or thousands of assets can take years – far too long for auditors; and far too expensive for the organization.
Agiliance IT-GRC 3.0 automates the entire process of IT Risk Assessment along with application controls testing, allowing audits to be done on time. In fact, payback for investing in Agiliance IT-GRC 3.0 is typically measured in months and even weeks due to the dramatic savings of time and budget required to complete risk assessments. Furthermore, the increased quality in reporting results in decreased fines and decreased costs of doing business associated with non-compliance events, not to mention, security breaches and their resulting negative potential public exposure.