When your organization executes cybersecurity well, it’s a positive for growth and development. But poorly managed cybersecurity can be a nightmare of breached data, lost reputation, system downtime, fines, and penalties.
Enterprises can avoid these kinds of nightmare scenarios by uncovering hidden risks and mitigating them effectively. But if your organization is like most, you could be facing an alarming disconnect between risk management and the organization’s larger business processes.
One of your goals as a CISO is to securely sustain business growth – but that’s not always easy. The disconnect between your organization’s technical footprint and its overall business model is a challenge. Risks are hidden within ever-changing business operations, and it’s hard to stay ahead of an army of overwhelming cyberthreats.
Without a sufficient view of the risk posture for your entire organization, you could be leaving the business wide open to risk. Here are three reasons to integrate your IT and business systems with effective systems and processes, giving you a holistic view of risk.
Typically, the task of mapping systems, servers, products, and services to assess risk can be a monumental undertaking given the complexity of most organizations. But integration of a centralized repository, where you can evaluate and monitor risk, can be a game changer.
For example, if your organization is looking for opportunities to market products and services in other countries, integrated security risk management makes assessing risks a clear and efficient process.
When you can make educated business decisions about data with clarity, you can move forward and expand the business with greater confidence. While other organizations walk blindly into critical decisions or take months to gather information, businesses that take a holistic approach can positively enable informed business decisions.
One of the most significant business challenges is keeping up with a constantly changing risk landscape. Many risks must be considered:
In this constantly changing environment, it can be a challenge for an organization’s systems and processes to identify, assess, and manage risk efficiently and effectively. A lack of effective risk management processes and integrated technology with business systems can create a frustrating delay and a stressful scramble to assess potential risks.
Without a clear system and process to identify and assess risk, it can take months of research rather than a few short weeks to do so. Reducing the timeline to determine risk is crucial, especially with market-driven changes or when a new product needs to get to market quickly.
However, with a holistic view of risk management, your business can evolve with the needs of a new product, a new service, or a shifting regulation while saving time and valuable staffing resources in the process.
If your organization is like many, your information security teams are limited in their ability to deliver an accurate and efficient risk assessment. Given the complexity and evolving nature of business, increased staffing resources might not be a sustainable answer. Instead, there needs to be a mindset of risk and security awareness across the entire organization so that leaders throughout the business can become the front-line defense.
Integrating your IT and business systems with a centralized integrated risk management (IRM) solution can help enhance risk ownership at the business leader level. As processes and procedures are identified, risks and controls are aligned with each process, application, or device. Each of those entities is then assigned to a business leader who will take on the risks and the controls needed.
With the responsibility of risks and controls, business leaders have naturally increased ownership because their success is dependent on supporting the necessary policies and practices to reduce risk. What’s more, with a proactive approach to risk management, your security team is no longer the only line of defense for your organization.
At Crowe, we know that your organization's risk can be complex and ever-evolving. That’s why our team uses our IRM and SecOps experience and deep specialization in ServiceNow® technology to guide organizations to sustainable growth.
We can help by providing experienced advisory capabilities, a proven process for successfully preparing to go live, specialized training, and a change management process to support adoption across your entire organization.
We’ve got an enterprise resource planning model for every need. And when you need continued ServiceNow support, you'll still be talking to the same Crowe team you started with.
