With data being the currency of today’s society, all organizations need to place increasing weight on cybersecurity, with clear policies, practices, and priorities around how to protect their critical business assets and corporate resources, including sensitive data. 

However, cybersecurity often remains overlooked, especially when there is no need to meet compliance, regulatory, or contractual commitments. This leaves opportunities open for threat actors – and presents areas of risk that can put companies out of business.  

Organizations that do not have an effective process to continuously identify and prioritize cyber risks will constantly be misaligning their cybersecurity investments or underinvesting altogether.

Cybersecurity risk quantification provides the ability to understand the potential financial impact of cyber risks and offers a unique angle on risk assessments to help ensure that risks are managed strategically and effectively. 

Problem: Insufficient cybersecurity

Many organizations rely solely on security technologies or their IT functions to manage cybersecurity. However, the focus of cybersecurity is not to solve a technology problem: It requires a comprehensive, consistent, strategic focus that encompasses people, process, and technology.

Without sufficient policies and procedures and checks and balances between IT and security teams, organizations typically experience challenges such as:

• Insufficient awareness of what’s happening in the market
• Not allocating enough budget to understand and address cybersecurity risks; not prioritizing the highest risk remediation needs within the budget
• Biased (e.g., incorrectly elevated) opinions regarding the maturity of their cybersecurity function and practices

A solution: Cyber risk quantification

Cyber risk quantification is a powerful solution when the right data points are accessible. It helps leadership teams address the following questions when challenged about risks and mitigation:

• What are the security gaps that pose the greatest risk to my business?
• What would be the financial impact if a cyber breach (or other risk incident) occurred?
• How can I perform a “return on investment” analysis for my cybersecurity initiatives, to confirm or adjust my investments?
• How can I incorporate today’s actual cyber threat landscape into my risk assessments?

This exercise provides business management teams with visibility into the risks that can most significantly impact their organization’s operations and financial stability, so that they can establish a prioritized and effective remediation plan for addressing the most concerning risks first. A quantified approach to risk also allows organizations to better project their budgeting needs to reduce the financial impact of a potential cybersecurity breach. 

Finally, effective cyber risk quantification can lead to optimizations in cyber insurance coverage. Working with insurance brokers or providers can be challenging, especially without full awareness of the organization’s risks and potential costs of a cyber breach. Cyber risk quantification provides specificity that businesses can leverage to potentially reduce and better align their cybersecurity insurance coverage and premium costs. Additionally, leadership teams will become more knowledgeable on how to manage their cyber risks and be better equipped for worst-case scenarios. 

How CohnReznick can help

We believe there is no “one size fits all” solution to cybersecurity. Our assessment capabilities are designed to help you answer questions that may be challenging for your own teams to answer, using an objective approach to develop unbiased results. We base our recommendations on the specific security indicators and characteristics of your business, such as revenue size, industry, number of employees, and business assets and technologies used.

Additionally, CohnReznick’s cybersecurity risk assessments incorporate methodologies for quantifying cybersecurity risks. We use a centralized platform powered by Mastercard to analyze data from past breaches and the current threat landscape, tailored to our clients’ business contexts. This approach helps clients prioritize risks, provides management with visibility into their organization’s risk score, and identifies remediation needs to reduce potential financial losses.

Learn more about our Cyber Risk Quantification services and contact our team to get started.