5 Ways to Elevate Your Organization With CRQ.
Transparency: Put a Number to the Consequences of Cyber Risk
As of 2023, cyber risk is the top global risk for companies of all sizes. But that insight alone doesn’t make managing it any easier. Cyber risk quantification helps you pinpoint the areas within this category that pose the greatest danger to your organization.
For example, which of these two scenarios would be more detrimental to your organization: a two-week outage at your primary production site or a data leak exposing your customer’s personal information? CRQ allows you to quantify each event’s potential financial impact, enabling you to prioritize threats based on their actual business consequences.
Make the Right Security Investments (And Get the Budget Needed to Do So)
Once you have a clear picture of your risk landscape, you’ll want to invest in defenses against those risks. But how much should you invest in a particular scenario? Investing €2 million in a security program to mitigate a potential €100,000 loss is likely not the best use of resources.
CRQ assigns financial values to cyber risks, allowing you to compare them directly. This enables you to strategically allocate your security budget to address the risks with the highest potential financial impact. Furthermore, CRQ data empowers you to convince stakeholders of the value of your cybersecurity strategy to the business. When you can demonstrate the possible economic consequences and the effectiveness of your proposed solutions in concrete financial terms, obtaining the necessary resources becomes more achievable.
Uncover the Risk in Your Supply Chain
Your company’s security doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Even the most robust internal defenses can be compromised by vulnerabilities within your supply chain. Upstream cyber incidents can have a domino effect, causing production disruptions due to part shortages or even direct attacks on your IT infrastructure stemming from compromised suppliers.
By quantifying potential risk scenarios within your supply chain, CRQ helps you identify the suppliers who could contribute to the worst-case scenario and prioritize their assessment accordingly. This allows you to implement appropriate safeguards in-house and collaborate with your suppliers to enhance their cyber resilience, ensuring your business remains robust against cascading cyber attacks.
Don’t Overpay (or Underpay) for Cyber Insurance
Sometimes, the most sensible approach to managing a risk is to transfer it to someone else. Therefore, cyber insurance can be a vital part of a comprehensive cyber risk strategy. However, to make informed decisions about premiums and coverage limits, you need to understand the scope and potential cost of the risks you face.
CRQ provides valuable data points to optimize your cyber insurance strategy. It lets you make informed decisions about which risks to transfer and at what cost, optimizing your overall cyber risk posture.
Stay Compliant
The regulations surrounding cyber risk are constantly evolving. Legislators emphasize the importance of robust cyber risk management, from the 2023 SEC disclosure rules in the US to the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU.
Regulations vary depending on your region and industry, but CRQ plays a critical role in supporting compliance. By quantifying your cyber risks and the effectiveness of your mitigation strategies, you give your organization and your board the data needed to stay compliant and avoid penalties.
Now that you understand the different scenarios where cyber risk quantification can be helpful, you can start considering which approach to CRQ would be most suitable for your organization.
Tomorrow we will take a detailed look at the two primary methods of cyber risk quantification, analyzing their respective advantages and disadvantages.