What is Cyber Risk Optimization and Why Is It So Important?
Not all vulnerabilities are created equal.
Many organizations spend their days mitigating low-risk vulnerabilities that have little to no impact on their business operations or bottom lines.
Cyber risk optimization factors in your cyber risk exposure and determines which countermeasures would be the most cost-effective for your organization. Think of it as a vulnerability cost-benefit analysis.
Will mitigating those vulnerabilities produce a strong ROI? Cyber risk optimization addresses that question and provides clear guidance on where to focus and prioritize mitigation efforts
So, where should you focus your risk mitigation strategies? In this blog, we’ll explore various tools and technologies and their role in effective cyber risk optimization.
Defining How Much Risk You Can Tolerate
To effectively optimize risk, it’s crucial to first determine how that risk should be managed. Your risks can fall under one of these categories:
Acceptable Risk
This refers to risk that your organization is willing to accept, based on both its potential impact and what mitigation will demand. The determination of whether an organization’s risk is acceptable is based on industry standards, regulatory requirements, and overall risk strategy.
Transferred Risk
This approach involves transferring the potential impact of a cyber risk to a third party, usually through insurance or by outsourcing specific activities. While this does not completely eliminate the risk, it results in shifting the financial responsibility for a possible incident to another entity.
Mitigated Risk
This strategy seeks to reduce potential damage by using various preventive and detective controls. In so doing, it lowers the probability or impact of a risk.
Each one of the above approaches plays a crucial role in a comprehensive cyber risk management strategy and allows organizations to address cyber threats in the most optimal way.
7 Cybersecurity Tools and Technologies that Help with Effective Cyber Risk Optimization
Effective cyber risk optimization is made possible by having the right tools and technologies in place to achieve the desired approach to risk. Whether it’s closing off access permissions to third parties or applying security policies across your organization, these tools can help manage acceptable, transferred, and mitigated risk.
Here are 7 tools and their benefits for cyber risk optimization.
- Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS): IDPS automatically blocks detected threats and continuously monitors network traffic to respond to threats as they occur. IDPS can also help lower the organization’s risk profile, potentially leading to reduced cybersecurity insurance premiums. IDPS is built to scale and integrates with other security tools such as firewalls, EDR solutions, SOAR platforms, and SIEM systems, and can aggregate data from a host of threat intelligence feeds.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): Access to sensitive data should not be granted freely. Research has found that 37% of all breaches involve stolen credentials. IAM prevents the risk of leaked credentials by implementing granular role-based access permissions. It ensures that users have only the necessary access permissions to perform their jobs and greatly minimizes the exposure of sensitive data to potential threats.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): SIEM systems correlate and analyze large volumes of security event data, which is collected from logs and other various sources to detect security incidents and anomalies early on. SOC and IT teams can take action if an incident arises by having real-time visibility into network activities and through contextually prioritized alerts. A study found that SOCs spend 32% of the day on incidents that pose no threat, wasting valuable risk mitigation efforts. SIEM systems help filter out the noise and prevent alert fatigue.
- Firewalls: Firewalls monitor and filter all network traffic, blocking unauthorized access and preventing the spread of malware and viruses. They support compliance by enabling organizations to create custom policy rules that meet specific regulatory requirements. Next-Gen Firewalls (NGFWs) differ from traditional firewalls, as they can identify and control applications regardless of port, protocol, or encryption, allowing for granular application-level policies and improved visibility. NGFWs also have advanced malware detection and integrated Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capabilities.
- Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): SOAR helps automate incident response actions based on predefined rules and playbooks. This can drastically accelerate Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and improve overall incident resolution efficiency. SOAR eliminates the element of human error in performing repetitive tasks such as alert triage, investigation, and containment, which enables security teams to focus on more strategic initiatives that contribute to the organization’s bottom line and business objectives. On average, SOC teams receive 4,484 alerts daily and spend nearly three hours a day manually triaging alerts. SOAR takes the frustration out of this process by automating the routine aspects of incident management.
- Threat Intelligence: Threat intelligence plays a huge role in risk optimization. Understanding a threat actor’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) gives you all the insights to anticipate, prepare, and proactively defend against attacks.
- AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations): AI has taken incident response to another level. AIOps leverage machine learning to predict future incidents by analyzing vast amounts of historical and real-time data to identify patterns and trends that indicate potential threats. But that’s not all. A study found that 72% of organizations have adopted AIOps to reduce the complexity of managing their multi-cloud environment. AI-driven cybersecurity tools can enhance incident detection rates and potentially cut response times in half. What used to take days to identify an incident can now be resolved in just hours or minutes with AI.
How Hyver Uses AI and Machine Learning to Optimize Cyber Risk Reduction
CISOs must have a clear understanding of the true financial impact associated behind each vulnerability to justify the investments behind the risk mitigation process and gain further support from the board.
You can optimize cyber risk and put an actual dollar value behind every risk with Hyver.
Hyver leverages AI/ML algorithms and shows you the probabilities behind the risks and the likelihood and cost of a breach to each business-critical asset. That way, you can make data-driven decisions and remove the guesswork on what assets to mitigate first.
Want to learn more about how Hyver can help you effectively optimize your cyber risk? Schedule a demo today.
