Geopolitical, regulatory, legal, compliance, and security risks continue to pose problems in the company as government rules increase worldwide. Because of the proliferation of laws and standards and the rise in stakeholder expectations, your firm may be more subject to compliance risks than ever before.
Far too many businesses remain stuck in the past when it comes to managing compliance risk. Today’s risk challenges move at the speed of business. Therefore your strategy and procedure must adapt as well. Here’s how you can go about it.
Some common Compliance and Security Risks
Consider the various company hazards before putting pen to paper to develop your risk management plan. Understanding the sorts of risks your company encounters to manage them effectively is critical.
1. Data Security and Fraud Risk
Data security and fraud risk is the possibility that your data or systems will be hacked, causing harm to your firm. Data breaches, cyberattacks, identity theft, and employee fraud are all examples of this. A company may face security risks if it fails to develop or implement a cybersecurity strategy. Inadequate personnel training, a lack of software testing, and poor security update procedures can all jeopardize a company’s revenues and image.
2. Legal and Compliance Risk
When new legislation or regulation threatens to disrupt your firm or fails to comply with an existing rule, you face legal and compliance risks. Legal risk is a compliance risk that happens when a corporation fails to adhere to a government’s business guidelines. Legal hazards can result in costly litigation and a lousy reputation for businesses. Compliance risk is a threat to a company’s reputation or finances caused by a violation of external rules and regulations or internal standards. A compliance breach can result in a corporation incurring hefty fines or losing clients.
What is Compliance Risk Management?
Compliance risk management is defined as anticipating possible hazards, assessing them, and adopting preventative measures to reduce/curb the threat.
After all, no corporation can complete compliance with all regulatory requirements even with an infinite budget and resources (which you’ll never have). Some sort of blunder is unavoidable. The aim is to limit the operational risk of noncompliance to acceptable levels for your board and regulators.
Compliance risk management is the art of controlling the risk of non-compliance to the greatest extent feasible, given the resources available to your compliance program and your company’s regulatory requirements.
Companies may accomplish realistic, successful compliance risk management in various methods, as you might expect. A standard-issue compliance risk management package that fits all enterprises in all industries cannot be purchased. You create one depending on your company’s business operations, workers, and regulatory compliance requirements.
12 Strategies for Mitigating Security Risks and Threats
Given the ever-changing threat landscape, here are 12 measures that should be included in your security risk mitigation plan in order to keep your business safe:
1. Be Compliant with Industry Regulations
Regulatory bodies in numerous industries recognize the critical role cybersecurity plays in assisting their companies in prospering in today’s environment. That is why stakeholders need to adhere to their information security laws strictly.
2. Do Not Ignore Physical Security
The security of physical hosting facilities is equally as crucial as digital security for enterprises that host their IT infrastructure. You may lower the danger of social engineering attacks, physical theft, and unhappy workers trying to disrupt you by enhancing your physical security as part of your cybersecurity risk mitigation plan.
3. Install Security Patches and Updates
Operating systems, antivirus, and other widely used software providers frequently make updates for their products. These updates, whether they provide new functionality or alleviate security issues, are critical to the continuous usage of these apps. You may defend yourself against newly identified viruses, malware, and third-party vulnerabilities by installing these updates.
4. Monitor and Protect Your Network Traffic
Poor network security can lead to various nightmare situations; thus, minimizing security risks in your network should include regularly monitoring network traffic for intrusion attempts. Because rogue personnel might leak critical information from within your network, this monitoring applies to both outward and inbound traffic. You can proactively identify malware, Denial of Service assaults, botnets, and man-in-the-middle attacks with correctly configured firewalls and threat intelligence systems and stop them before they cause any harm.
5. Develop an Incident Response (IR) Plan
An incident response (IR) plan is a written collection of tools and instructions that can assist your team in promptly identifying, dealing with, and recovering from cybersecurity threats. For example, if a security breach happens, a good incident response plan ensures that you have the proper people, procedures, and technology to handle the issue and minimize damage. An IR strategy is notably effective in defending against data breaches, ransomware, Denial of Service attacks, malware, and other assaults that aim to disrupt the operation of a system.
6. Monitor Your Vendors
Your firm most likely relies on external vendors for part of its operations. As a result, the safety and security posture of these firms might influence your company’s cybersecurity readiness, mainly if their services are vital to your operations. Hackers that target popular software systems frequently use third-party vulnerabilities.
7. Backup and Encrypt Your Data
Backups are essential for preserving company continuity during a disaster. Encryption provides additional backup protection, preventing unwanted access to your important data. With these cybersecurity risk mitigation methods, you can avoid data loss from ransomware attacks, breaches, or human mistakes.
8. Enforce the Use of Strong Passwords
Passwords authenticate users and manage access to restricted resources or information. As a result, the more robust your password systems are, the lower your risk of unauthorized access to sensitive data through compromised or stolen credentials, man-in-the-middle attacks, phishing emails, and brute-force assaults.
9. Train Your Team
Regular training is the most effective strategy to reduce your team’s risk of becoming a security concern. This training should cover not only your cybersecurity or IT employees, but all team members since any of them might become a vulnerability in your operations. When adequately taught, you can prevent security vulnerabilities from social engineering attacks such as phishing and scam emails.
10. Conduct a Cybersecurity Risk Assessment
Conduct a cybersecurity risk check to identify the dangers your company faces, the likelihood of their occurrence, and the type of harm they can inflict. The risk assessment findings will indicate your organization’s readiness to respond to security events. They will reveal weaknesses in your infrastructure to common assaults such as phishing, malware, brute-force attacks, and ransomware.
11. Put a Killswitch in Place
A killswitch shields you against large-scale attacks. It is a reactive cybersecurity protection method in which your information technology staff shuts down all systems as soon as anything suspicious is detected until the issues are resolved.
Most cybercriminals don’t try to hide their traces, especially when they don’t anticipate getting discovered. So, have your IT security staff regularly evaluate all server logs and undertake cybersecurity framework audits to ensure their integrity. You should also invest in network forensic investigation tools to examine the flow of information over your network.
Human mistakes cause the majority of malicious firewall and ransomware assaults. Some are even the fault of your personnel. Ensure that all new personnel is scanned to ensure that they are not a cyber danger to your firm. You should also implement steps to deter employee neglect, which contributes significantly to cyber threats.
12. Develop a Secure Cybersecurity Policy
The rules in place have a significant impact on the cybersecurity of your firm. Do you have policies in place to prevent and identify data breaches? How frequently do your IT staff perform risk assessments and penetration testing? It all starts with your instructions!
Compliance Should be Ingrained in the Culture
Following the appropriate methods, using the proper tools, and doing the same old thing will not be enough for compliance management success. You must instill a compliance culture throughout the business. Finally, commitment to compliance should not be pushed on personnel but rather originate from within.
Use Spenza for Compliance and security risk mitigation
Spenza – SaaS Management platform, empowers companies to seamlessly manage different vendors, automate procurement processes and monitor compliance and security risks.
