Critical Capabilities of IT Risk Management Tools

Risk management is rapidly becoming the foundation of organizational security efforts, replacing checklist compliance as a cornerstone of a successful security program. This shift has come from the unique configuration of technologies specific to a given organization that industry or geographic regulations were not designed to accommodate. The shift to prioritizing risk encompasses compliance, assuming that best practices are implemented alongside controls specific to the unique risks that the organization faces. Unfortunately, managing risk and maintaining compliance using old products like modular GRC software has proved to be more troublesome and even harmful to organizations who need greater visibility into their program. Here we’ll examine the critical capabilities necessary for a platform to help teams effectively manage risk.

Through research, it’s been found that about half of IT risk management practitioners look for automation for their risk remediation processes, while the other half seeks to track their compliance management processes. Information Technology Risk Management software uses management systems and services that function across all levels of your life cycle. Some core functions of IT risk management are the facilitation of risk workflows, aggregation of data from IT and security operations, the creation of risk and control repositories, establish consistent risk management processes, risk mitigation and remediation protocols, compliance standard reporting, analytics tracking, and customizable risk reports to present to C-suite, board members and external stakeholders.

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Functionality to look for in an IT Risk Management Tool

By keeping track of the following items, you can confidently invest in an Information Technology Risk Management that can continuously monitor your company’s ITRM efforts.

Workflow Automation

Workflow templates that facilitate processes related to your risk management, cybersecurity, and auditing practices.

CyberStrong helps enable strong and asynchronous workflow automation out-of-the-box through the roles function and the ability to assign an individual responsible for the control as well as collaborators, allowing for a clear chain of responsibility across an assessment.

Compliance Content Mapping

How flexibly you can map controls and protocols to requirements from different frameworks and regulations, as well as providing evidence for auditors and stakeholders.

In the CyberStrong platform, both risk and compliance teams can attach evidence at the control level. Furthermore, they can leverage crosswalking abilities to project their compliance status from one framework to another.

Risk Analysis

The use and integration of qualitative and quantitative risk assessments. Risks should be clearly mapped to business processes and include threat modeling.

With more integrated platforms like CyberStrong, risk and compliance are addressed together. In the CyberStrong platform, risk assessment protocols are baked in at the control level – allowing organizations to understand risk and compliance at the same level of granularity.

Risk Remediation Life Cycle

This is for the flexibility of customizations that come with workflows suited to your organizational structure and risk ranking. Additionally, this works in tandem with dashboards that can provide a targeted view of risk information across IT, security, privacy and compliance.

Effective solutions like CyberStrong will enable collaboration across the remediation cycle regardless of whether a given team is centralized or distributed. Teams can track their remediation from one assessment to the next using the snapshot feature and illustrate that progress to leadership.

User Experience

A good user experience will focus on operational effectiveness and functionality that will enable your IT. The more accessible the program is to your team, the easier it is to learn and utilize for multiple driven approaches and workflows.

Integrations

Any integrated risk management should support seven basic integration criteria. These are:

Data loss prevention

Threat and vulnerability management

Application security testing

Secure configuration management database

Digital forensics and incident response

Threat intelligence platforms

Identity and access management capabilities

File Integrity Monitoring

Real-Time Assessments

Having a management tool that allows you to monitor your risk in real-time is vital to continuous risk monitoring. It is necessary for benchmarking as well as moving away from static reporting practices like spreadsheets.

Platforms that support real-time and continuous assessment are built fundamentally different from the modular governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tools that organizations used when taking a compliance-first approach. CyberStrong supports continuous assessment by enabling risk, compliance, and audit teams to review and update in real-time all while delivering unprecedented visibility to both technical and business-side leadership.

Board/ Senior Executive Reporting

A great integrated risk management solution will contain the capabilities to translate your data into a readable, natural language format. This can help justify your case when asking for more security funding or explaining your IT risk management strategy to the board and stakeholders.

CyberStrong’s Governance Dashboards deliver previously unseen visibility to executive leadership on the risk and compliance posture of the organization. Fully customizable, the Governance Dashboards enable information security leaders to present the status of their program clearly and effectively to the Board and the entire C-suite.

Digital Asset Discovery

The ability to evaluate risks associated with web-based integrations such as cloud based technologies, social, mobile delivery channels, the IoT and wearable

Devices.

Thankfully, using an integrated risk management solution like CyberStrong can cover all your Information Technology Risk Management needs, and much more. By utilizing patented AI technology and real-time risk and compliance workflows, your ITRM initiatives can become streamlined and optimized from a small business to enterprise level. If you have any questions, give us a call at 1-800 NIST CSF or click here and request a free demo.