Risk Analysis plays a role in corporate governance and performance, ensuring that senior management allocates resources in the most cost-effective way to balance information security with business needs. The risk analysis process must link security exposures and business needs; otherwise risk analysis may lead to too much or too little information security.
The risk analysis process varies according to an organization’s particular needs and skills, as well as the particular risk analysis tools deployed. Fundamentally, the risk analysis process must answer these questions:
Risk Analysis identifies and evaluates business processes and supporting information systems, potential system vulnerabilities and threats, calculated risks and the effectiveness of possible controls. Once these steps are completed, the process should be repeated on a regular basis to ensure that the decisions made and controls implemented continuously reduce risk while effectively meeting business needs and goals.
Risk Analysis typically contains most if not all of our other security services and are generally customized to the environment and the compliancy issues faced by the organization including HIPAA, SOX, GLBA and FISMA.
This process is conducted both on and off site and the overall process varies depending on the compliancy and the organization for which the work is being done.
The goal of a Risk Analysis is to not only provide a technical assessment of vulnerabilities but also a business justification and prioritization for implementing security controls.