Achieving Business Objectives While Safely Managing Risk

Most businesses today run on information. It doesn't matter which department you look at - finance, product development, marketing - all of them need reliable data to make decisions and move the company forward.

But this reliance on digital data often creates new risks. Cyberattacks continue to get more sophisticated and destructive every year. This reality has forced businesses to be extremely careful about how they collect, store, and share their information.

Without the right risk management strategy in place, the consequences could be considerable.

What are The Risks Associated with Digital Data?

• Cybersecurity Breaches - Cyber threats grow every year. As a result, any business that fails to implement adequate security measures is essentially leaving the door wide open for a data breach. An event like a successful ransomware attack can easily cripple operations or even lead to organizations closing their doors for good.

• Non-Compliance Penalties - Many businesses are subject to specific regulations set by various governing bodies, such as the GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA. These regulations impose significant responsibilities on businesses, encompassing a range of areas such as data protection protocols, consumer privacy rules, and various disclosure policies. If a company fails to meet these requirements, it can face a wide range of consequences, most notably hefty fines if falling into noncompliance.

• Data Integrity Issues - Maintaining data accuracy and reliability becomes increasingly challenging when it's constantly being transferred between different systems. The "chain of custody" gets blurry, and it’s easy to lose track of its origin and changes. This can lead to long-term data integrity problems.

• Financial Implications - A company's financial health can be a direct reflection of the quality and control of its data. As soon as data gets corrupted or compromised, businesses can start making bad decisions based on inaccurate information. This, in turn, can directly lead to lost revenues or force the business to spend more time and resources on trying to recover its data records.

• Reputational Damage - Customers put their trust in the companies they do business with. They have a baseline expectation that their personal information isn’t being poorly managed. If that trust is broken because of negligence caused by weak security, the company's reputation can be damaged. Rebuilding that confidence is often an exhausting, uphill battle.

• Disruptions to Business Operations - Any issue with your data has the potential to negatively impact a number of important business functions. It doesn't matter if the root cause is a faulty system, a security breach, or just a simple oversight by an employee. These kinds of issues can lead to lasting consequences that ripple through the business and impact smooth operations.

Key Data Risk Management Elements

With all of these risks, how can your business get ahead of them? The good news is that with the right data risk management strategy in place, you can significantly lower the severity of each of these risks.

To achieve this, there are some key elements you’ll need:

Core Business Alignment

To manage your data risk effectively, you’ll want to ensure that any strategies you put in place align with your business’s larger objectives.

You can ensure this by identifying where and how you collect new information and quantifying the value that this process has. This helps you to prioritize the most important data sources and ensure they stay protected.

Be sure to identify any of your high-value digital assets, including client details, financial records, or any proprietary business information. Having a map of these types of critical assets ensures that, as you start initiating new data protection measures, you’ll ensure these high-priority items are validated first.

Regular Vulnerability Assessments

The worst-case scenario is waiting for disaster to strike before you realize action needs to be taken. Ensuring this never happens means proactively performing regular risk assessments throughout the year on all your critical systems and networks.

Make it a priority to conduct these assessments at the very least twice a year. This can be essential if your business is following a strict compliance framework such as HITRUST or CMMC.

Established Risk Mitigation Strategies

Once your assessments are finished, you should focus your efforts on creating a detailed risk mitigation strategy. This will help you to ensure you’re deploying the right mix of technical, administrative, and physical safeguards within your infrastructure to keep your data secure.

An important aspect of this planning is to educate your teams on potential areas where sensitive business data could become compromised. Show them how they can be part of the solution by remaining more aware of cybersecurity dangers and applying best data management practices.

How to Make Risk Management Part of Your Current Workflows

Use a Governance Framework

By having a data governance framework in place, you’re able to follow a structured strategy for managing all your company’s data effectively throughout its lifecycle. These frameworks are designed to define clear roles and responsibilities for data stewardship and ensure that everyone knows their part in helping to preserve and protect it.

This does mean, however, that you will want to check your systems and processes regularly to verify they meet all regulatory and ethical requirements. Make sure you’re clearly communicating new policies as they’re released for data storage or removal, and work closely with external partners to do the same.

Put Strict Security Protocols in Place

Security hardening should be part of your everyday data management process. Implement strict access restrictions to sensitive systems, regularly change user credentials, and leverage outside security services such as penetration testing teams to validate the integrity of any systems you have in place. This helps you minimize your exposure and lower your risk profile.

Data encryption is another important element to enable. This helps to protect your data in transit and at rest. In the event that your data ever becomes compromised, attackers still won’t be able to access it.

Create and Test an Incident Response and Recovery Plan

Building out an incident response and recovery plan is critical for properly managing serious events, like a data breach or other major operational shutdown. Your plan should lay out the exact steps needed to identify the issue, thoroughly investigate the root cause, and guide the business back to a reliable state.

Your recovery strategy should also outline clear communication pathways and well-defined protocols. These elements are essential to guaranteeing the fastest possible return to normal operations.

Keep Data Risk Management a High Priority

Ensuring your data risk mitigation strategies align with your company's core objectives is critical.

By following the strategies discussed, you’ll not only protect the integrity of your business data but also build stronger relationships with the customers who have come to trust your organization.

Author Bio Information

Author Bio:

Nazy Fouladirad is President and COO of Tevora, a global leading cybersecurity consultancy. She has dedicated her career to creating a more secure business and online environment for organizations across the country and world. She is passionate about serving her community and acts as a board member for a local nonprofit organization.