A cyber risk management framework allows your business to recognize and mitigate threats. It also reduces the cost of data breaches, malware, and ransomware attacks, which can devastate your organization’s productivity.
However, implementing a framework is a challenging task. Many templates are available, but choosing the right one is crucial for your company.
Define Your Goals
The first step in developing a framework is determining your goals. Your objectives should be clear and measurable to keep track of progress over time. This way, your team will know when to make changes to keep up with threats and address vulnerabilities.
Defining your cybersecurity goals can be difficult, but it must align with your business objectives. This will help reinforce the message that cybersecurity is there to bolster business sustainability and success rather than hinder productivity.
Determine what assets you want to protect from cybercriminals, including data, critical systems, and networks. Consider the impact of a successful attack on these assets and the costs of mitigating those risks.
Remember to include third parties in your risk assessment, as many attackers target these vendors and suppliers to gain access to information. Also, remember to include backup processes in your strategy. Implementing a 3-2-1 backup system that saves three copies of the same data on different media types and one copy offsite is a good idea.
Perform Research and Analysis
Cyber attacks can cost a business a lot of money in lost revenue, data loss, downtime, and repair costs. This is why it’s essential to use a cyber risk management framework to identify and mitigate threats before they occur.
It’s best to approach this step methodically and thoroughly since it decreases the chances of overlooking potential risks. Ensure that you have considered all the possible ways your organization could be vulnerable, including third-party vendors who may be connected to your internal systems via a network and have access to sensitive information.
Once you have identified all the risks, you should treat those that can be treated with controls and gain confidence that these will work effectively and as expected throughout the lifecycle of the system or service. This is often called ‘security assurance’ or ‘technical assurance’. If you cannot fully treat a particular risk, it will still need to be managed and accounted for, known as residual risk. Be sure to document your findings and present them to decision-makers in a way that’s impactful and understandable to them.
Implement Strategies
As a nonprofit, you must create a plan for preventing attacks and responding to them if they occur. This plan should include processes like firewalls and parameters for passwords. It should also address how your organization will respond to an attack and limit the damage it could cause. Once you have created your plan, store it in a secure place like a board management platform.
Cybersecurity issues are a top concern for businesses of all sizes. According to PurpleSec (2021), cyberattacks cost companies an average of $7.9 million during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A robust cybersecurity risk management framework will help your business protect itself from cyberattacks and maintain compliance with relevant regulations. It will also enable you to recognize & prioritize risks based on their potential impact. Implementing a framework will also make your team more effective. Tools like ClickUp, a secure project management tool with data encryption, two-factor authentication & role-based permissions, can help streamline the process. To further protect your data, ClickUp is ISO 27001 compliant.
Create a Response Plan
Cyber attacks can be devastating to the reputation of a business. A response plan ensures that organizations can react quickly and in an organized way to minimize damage.
An incident response plan includes six steps: identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. The label focuses on finding the source of the attack and is usually done by the cybersecurity team. Containment aims to isolate the attack by blocking off access to areas where the attacker is active. Eradication focuses on eliminating threats from your systems and networks. Recovery focuses on restoring systems to their pre-attack state.
Creating a response plan involves assigning responsibilities and setting up processes that can be quickly followed in the event of an incident. A secure project management tool like ClickUp can help manage these protocols and ensure all teams are accountable for their actions. Moreover, it allows you to implement additional security features such as data encryption, two-factor authentication, and role-based permissions. This will ensure that sensitive information stays safe and protected from cyber threats.
Monitor Your Framework
Cyberattacks are on the rise, and a risk management framework is essential to protecting your business from the threats that may come. NTM’s fully managed cybersecurity services protect against cyberattacks and help you mitigate the risks that can damage your organization, from data breaches to ransomware.
Once you’ve established a risk management framework, monitoring your implementation and ensuring it functions properly is essential. Continual monitoring is necessary to identify vulnerabilities and address issues before they become a significant problem. This includes assessing the impact, likelihood, and predisposing conditions of your business’s threats and reviewing how effectively the security controls are working.
In addition to ensuring that your risk management framework is functional, choosing a secure project management tool to manage the framework is essential. ClickUp is an excellent option, as it offers encryption and two-factor authentication and can help you secure your information. Learn how ClickUp can help your nonprofit or mission-driven business build a robust risk management framework for cyberattacks and keep your data safe.