TL;DR Tugboat Logic’s Risk Assessment Module guides you through the process of conducting a risk assessment by providing recommendations of which IT and security risks to consider, how to best mitigate these risks, and automatically tracking the compliance of mitigating controls.
The Risky Business of Risk Assessments
Risk assessments are mandatory for passing your audits and protecting your business from serious threats. It’s also one of the top reasons for delays in achieving SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification. A lack of understanding the process leads to a lack of visibility and incomplete audits.
When it comes to risk assessment, the main causes of delay in certification are:
- Struggling to understand how to conduct a risk assessment
- Submitting an incomplete risk assessment to your auditor
- Doing a last-minute risk assessment so you run out of time
Risk Assessments Are Crucial to Any Business
It’s an audit requirement.
Conducting a risk assessment is one of the most important tasks for SOC 2 and ISO 27001. A risk assessment tells you what you need to include in your audit scope and happens to be a requirement for passing your audit! Risk assessments are commonly treated as an afterthought, which doesn’t give organizations enough time to conduct one properly. Not performing a risk assessment, or conducting an incomplete risk assessment can delay the completion of your certification, and in the worst case, fail your audit altogether. Risk assessments are also mandatory for other security frameworks, including HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIST CSF.
It’s how to identify security gaps and take action.
Risks are constantly evolving, so it’s important for organizations to adopt a proactive approach to risk management. Identifying gaps and creating action items to eliminate them near the start of your compliance journey will protect critical assets, and prevent operational, financial, and reputational risks to your organization.
It’s how to best prepare for threats.
If an organization fails to identify risks, they will be ill-prepared if/when the risk occurs, leaving the organization vulnerable. Unknown risks can cause significant harm to the organization, including customer dissatisfaction, fines, damaged reputation, financial loss, and business failure.
It helps make informed business decisions.
Conducting an effective risk assessment helps management understand critical risks and how they may impact strategic planning.
Our Solution: Immediate Visibility Into all the Risks Unique to Your Business
The Risk Assessment Module guides you through the process of conducting a risk assessment by providing recommendations of which IT and security risks to consider, how to best mitigate these risks, and automatically tracking the compliance of mitigating controls. Only Tugboat Logic’s Risk Assessment Module provide you with:
- Automated risk recommendation library tied to strategic objectives
- Automated mapping of mitigating controls to risks to industry-standard frameworks, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and NIST CSF
- Automated tracking for compliance of mitigating controls
How It Works
The risk assessment process is broken into five simple steps. When completed, you have a full understanding of all your risks, confidence that controls are in place, and that it’s all being tracked in real-time.
Step 1: Define your scope
Go to the Risk Assessment Module under Continuous Compliance on the left hand navigation bar, and complete the Risk Identification Survey to define a custom set of risks based on your unique strategic objectives.
Step 2: Identify Risks
Once you’ve completed the survey, you may access your Risk Register. Your Risk Register will be auto-populated with a list of identified risks based on Tugboat Logic’s pre-built library of IT & security risks mapped to industry-standard frameworks, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST CSF, GDPR, and CCPA.
Step 3: Assess Risks
Conduct a risk analysis of each identified risk, including evaluating the inherent risk, risk treatment, and residual risk, to establish a most-to-least-critical importance ranking of items.
Step 4: Identify Security Controls
Analyze existing controls that are in place to minimize or eliminate the likelihood of risks and determine if existing control measures are adequate, or if additional mitigating controls are necessary. You can leverage Tugboat Logic’s recommended mitigating controls to make this process easier and faster!
Step 5: Monitor Risks
Once the risks have been identified, assessed, and responded to, it’s essential to continuously monitor the progress of risk mitigation actions. Use the Tugboat Logic Real-Time Risk Register to get automatic tracking of the compliance status of your mitigating controls. To ensure that potential new risks are identified and that current control measures are sufficient, we recommend re-evaluating your risk assessment on a quarterly or annual basis.
Start Your Risk Assessment Now
Learn more about this new module or sign up for a trial to experience the automated risk assessment process for yourself.
Tugboat Logic enables businesses of all sizes to manage and maintain their security compliance—all in one place. Want to learn more about how our platform works? Get in touch with a member of our team for more information.