Once upon a time, risk management was a relatively calm area of organizational life. Management made sure that employee-, customer- and product-safety measures were in place. Controls and safeguards deterred theft and fraud. The regulatory environment was relatively stable. Organizations insured against losses and employed hedging, diversification and other time-tested risk management tools. Most organizations understood the risks they faced and addressed them with fairly reliable approaches. Risks could be quantified, losses could be remediated and senior executives could sleep at night.
Times have changed.
In recent years, cyber capabilities have extended borders and reach, creating new customers, business partners, avenues of access, methods of innovation and forms of value. While generating myriad opportunities, the volume and velocity of change have also rendered risks far more numerous and complicated. Risks have multiplied as business models and methods, information and communication technologies, and laws and regulations have become more complex. Add to that the globalization of markets, supply chains, innovation and crime, and you have a transformed risk environment.
As a result, today’s risks can be hard to identify and quantify, harder still to avoid, and intertwined with formerly unrelated risk areas. This environment calls for a series of shifts to broader, deeper, more dynamic and holistic risk management approaches. Most organizations already possess many useful elements of a cyber risk management program. For example, policies, firewalls, access management tools and third-party due diligence hold a key place in a cyber risk program. Yet a lack of an aligned, integrated and measurable cyber risk management program renders most cyber risk initiatives inadequate, inefficient or both.
Grant Thornton LLP utilizes a three-prong approach to align, integrate and measure (AIM) cyber risk outcomes. This can help you make informed decisions about your business strategy, develop an integrated cyber risk strategy and implement comprehensive solutions to manage cyber risk.
We invite you to learn how a holistic approach is best organized by means of a framework that helps management identify roles, responsibilities, relationships and other relevant factors.
Read our white paper Taking AIM at Cyber Risk.