Managed detection and response specialist Critical Start has released its Cyber Risk Register, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that records, monitors, and mitigates cyber risks centrally.

Built to tackle the intricate and ever-evolving landscape of cyber risks within organizations, it categorizes risks by severity, aligns them with security controls, and manages treatment plans. The aim is to ensure high and critical risks receive prompt attention and that any actions taken for risk acceptance or mitigation are carefully reviewed.

The platform has features to streamline risk governance, including automated reminders and approval workflows. Time-stamped audit trails serve as a record of all risk management activities, helping with compliance and accountability and strengthening security measures, ensuring regulatory requirements are met.

The register can also create and manage logical workspaces, tailored to the structure and requirements of each business context. This feature allows organizations to carve out dedicated spaces for various domains such as internal IT, business applications, or third-party vendors, fostering focused risk management strategies that align with the context at hand.

With access controls in place, the right stakeholders are granted visibility and involvement, which helps promote collaboration while safeguarding data privacy across departments or external entities.

“This creates a secure vault that ensures access to what is needed, when it is needed,” said George Jones, chief information security officer (CISO) at Critical Start. As he explained, a central principle of the register is to enhance efficiency while providing comprehensive insights into the organization’s risk landscape.

A Snapshot of the Cyber Risk Landscape

“Through the categorization of risks, alignment with controls, and diligent tracking of mitigation efforts, the Register empowers security leaders to swiftly and adeptly make well-informed decisions,” Jones explained.

Executive dashboards and reports serve as critical resources, providing a current snapshot of an organization’s cyber risk landscape. These tools can act as guides, highlighting the most important risk metrics and showing the financial impact of potential and actual threats.

“They don’t just stop at giving you the big picture; they also allow you to zoom in to see the details of each risk, making it easier for strategic decision-makers to effectively prioritize,” Jones said.

By putting cyber risks into financial terms, these tools make it much simpler to communicate with stakeholders who might not be compliance- or tech-savvy.

Adaptative, Intelligent Capabilities Key

Chris Morales, CISO at Netenrich, said demand for always-available services means attacks now have both an operational and business impact.

“Organization operations is no longer solely a matter of information and communication technologies and systems,” Morales explained. “Every function, service and product operated and designed by firms has a specific cyber-risk profile, which in turn has different business impacts.”

From Morales’s perspective, the key components of an effective cyber risk monitoring strategy include digital risk decision-making based on adaptive, intelligent, and performance-driven capabilities, which leverage human and machine intelligence that can be measured and optimized. “This approach must be rooted in data that lets us drive greater value from existing investments while making life better for people doing the work,” Morales said.

Reducing IT Security Workloads with Automation

Cyber-risk monitoring was traditionally focused on the IT infrastructure risks presented by hardware and software bugs, said Pathlock CEO Piyush Pandey. But today’s threats are focused on user access. “Organizations need to know what level of risk they are willing to take with user access and adjust their access policies accordingly,” he said.

That is trickier than it sounds because a policy that is too restrictive hampers productivity and causes user frustration, which often leads to workarounds that create greater risk. “Organizations can stay ahead by eliminating access risk – early and often,” Pandey advised.

In the case of monitoring cyber risk, the ability to automate critical but routine tasks can help reduce the workload of internal audit, risk management and IT security. However, Pandey maintained, as with many functions in an organization, challenges are driven by the costs associated with internal and external resources.

“Defining a well thought out set of workflows for managing access and monitoring access and transaction exceptions in real-time can free up internal resources, reduce the dependency on external resources, and create a more proactive risk management program,” Pandey said.