Next-Level Cybersecurity Risk Assessment: Improve your Security Posture with Thrive

Are you adequately protected against the emerging threats in today’s digital landscape? Without a cybersecurity risk assessment, it’s difficult to know for certain. The unfortunate truth is that while digital transformation and evolving technologies deliver a myriad of benefits to businesses, digitalisation presents an ever-increasing range of threats too.

Between 2021 and 2023 alone, the number of companies facing data breaches increased by 72%. Now that criminals have more advanced tools and resources to help them conduct attacks, from generative AI, to automated tools, cybersecurity threats will only continue to grow.

A cybersecurity risk assessment is how you ensure you have a clear view of your security posture, the vulnerabilities in your ecosystem, and the strategies you can use to overcome threats. It’s not just crucial to protecting your data and reputation. Regular risk assessments can protect you from costly fines, and help you make the right investment decisions when exploring security trends.

Here’s everything you need to know about why cybersecurity risk assessments are so important, and how Thrive, and TechGrants, can help protect your business.

What is a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment?

A cybersecurity risk assessment is a systematic method of examining a company’s security portfolio, and identifying vulnerabilities and threats within an IT environment. These assessments assess the likelihood of an organisation facing a security event, identify the impact of certain occurrences, and help business leaders implement strategies to mitigate risk.

Risk assessments in the cybersecurity landscape aren’t new, but they’re growing in importance, as around 1 in 5 businesses say they’ve been exposed to a cyber attack in the last couple of years.

Though eliminating all risks from your organisation’s IT strategy is difficult, a cybersecurity risk assessment gives businesses the insights they need to understand where the biggest threats to their organisation are, and which strategies they need to improve.

Effective assessments help businesses to answer crucial questions about their security, such as:

• What are the most important IT assets in our organisation, and how would a breach to those systems impact our company, customers and stakeholders?
• What kind of breaches would have the most significant impact on our business, such as human error, malware attacks, or phishing scams?
• Can we identify all of the sources of threats in our organisation, and do we know how to evaluate the potential severity of each threat?
• Are we implementing the right controls and systems to protect our data and customers, and remain compliant with industry standards?
• Are the third-party groups we’re working with implementing the same security measures as us, to reduce our exposure to additional risks?
• Do we have a prioritised roadmap in place for weakness and threat mitigation, and how will we implement fixes to potential threats in future?

The Benefits of a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment

Security, privacy, and compliance are critical concerns for any organisation. Each industry has its own best practices and regulatory guidelines in place, governing how companies should collect, protect, and store information. Whether you’re running an educational institution, healthcare company, or finance organisation, failing to implement the right security strategies can have serious repercussions.

A cybersecurity risk assessment, particularly one that’s conducted regularly, with the help of the right experts, helps you to ensure that you’re taking the right precautions to protect yourself from threats.

An effective assessment will ensure you can:

Identify Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Even with intuitive cybersecurity strategies in place, your IT infrastructure can sometimes still be infiltrated by malicious actors, leading to serious issues for your business. Attackers that identify weaknesses in your network, the devices your employees use, or your cloud ecosystem can use them to launch attacks against your organisation, stealing valuable data, or causing unplanned downtime.

Cybersecurity risk assessments show you where your biggest vulnerabilities might lie, whether that’s in your partnerships and supply chains, your networks, or your cloud software. With that information, you can implement strategies that help you to avoid data loss, application downtime, and breaches.

Determine Ways to Mitigate Cybersecurity Threats

On a broad scale, a cybersecurity risk assessment helps you to ensure you’re implementing the right strategies to reduce cybersecurity threats. A company like Thrive, that conducts cybersecurity risk assessments on behalf of business leaders doesn’t just introduce you to your vulnerabilities, it gives you a clear path and strategy for risk mitigation.

You can use your risk assessment to identify the best ways of reducing your exposure to potential attacks, whether they’re caused by human errors, faulty software, or bugs. You can even use the information gathered from cybersecurity risk assessments to inform your security training and policies, helping to foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness.

Reduce Compliance Risks

Excellent compliance standards are crucial in today’s business landscape, particularly for organisations that operate in highly regulated industries like education, finance, and healthcare. A cybersecurity risk assessment can help you identify whether you’re adhering to specific standards set by frameworks like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR.

With the right strategy, you can ensure you’re taking the right approach to information security governance and compliance, protecting your company from legal repercussions and significant fines. This can even help improve your chances of attracting investors and partners that help your business to grow in the future.

Improve Your Business Reputation

Improving your security posture isn’t just crucial from a compliance perspective, or to protect your business against financial losses. It’s also critical for earning the trust of your customers, and elevating your brand’s reputation. If you show your customers and stakeholders that you’re committed to protecting data effectively, they’re more likely to trust you.

Conducting regular cybersecurity risk assessments demonstrates an ongoing focus on eliminating potential threats, and protecting the people you work with. You can even use your assessments to show partners and investors how you’re investing in improving your security strategy.

Optimise Your Investment Decisions

Finally, investing in a regular cybersecurity risk assessment can help you to make better investment decisions as your business continues to digitally transform. As technology continues to evolve, with new solutions emerging for everything from real-time monitoring, to AI-powered threat analysis, and beyond, it can be difficult to know which investments will deliver the most value to your business.

A thorough risk assessment ensures that you’re spending your time and money on the strategies that are most likely to have a positive impact on your company. Companies like Thrive can even give you prioritised lists that show you which plans to implement first, based on the impact they could have on your business, finances, and reputation.

Simplifying Cybersecurity Risk Assessments with Thrive

Often, conducting a cybersecurity risk assessment can be a time-consuming and complex process, particularly for companies with ever-evolving technology stacks. There are numerous steps involved, from determining the value of the information and data you hold, to prioritising assets, assessing threats and vulnerabilities, and implementing new controls.

Thrive Next Gen, one of the market leaders in the security and technology landscape, simplifies the process, with an end-to-end solution for state-of-the-art risk assessments.

Thrive’s cybersecurity risk assessment service allows companies to access a team of cybersecurity experts, who can holistically evaluate their cybersecurity posture against the Center for Internet Security’s 18 core control areas. This provides business leaders with a clear picture of their current risk profile, as well as the insights they need to develop a strategic roadmap for the future.

The three step process couldn’t be simpler:

Step 1: Current Security Assessment

To begin, Thrive’s security team takes an in-depth look at your entire organisation and technology stack, evaluating all of the different factors at play that could have an impact on your security standard. During the assessment, Thrive’s team reviews all three levels of controls, to determine exactly how well protected you are against potential threats from all potential avenues.

Step 2: CIS Comparison

Following a comprehensive examination of where your organisation stands in line with the 18 CIS controls, Thrive compares those findings with recommended best practices. For instance, they’ll look at how you’re implementing NextGen firewall solutions, overarching governance plans, strategies for multifactor authentication, and so on. This gap analysis gives the Thrive team a clear insight into the methods you can use to improve your security posture.

Step 3: Planning for Risk Mitigation

Finally, Thrive prepares a clear report for all executives and tech team, that recaps the CIS standards you should be implementing in an easy-to-understand table. You’ll see how your security posture compares to the latest risk mitigation tactics, and instantly see exactly where you need to make changes to your strategy. Thrive even helps you prioritise your strategy for which initiatives to implement first, based on the level of urgency identified.

Strengthen Security, with Thrive and TechGrants

While Thrive gives companies the insights they need to understand their cybersecurity posture, and create a comprehensive plan for mitigation, TechGrants steps in to handle the rest. We can work with you to help you find the right security vendors for different needs, such as firewalls and real-time monitoring solutions.

More importantly, we can help you access the funding you need to not only conduct cybersecurity risk assessments, but implement the recommended safeguards. That means you can upgrade your security posture, without breaking your budget.

Contact TechGrants today to see how we can help you identify and eliminate threats in your organisation, with the help of Thrive’s cybersecurity risk assessment service.