Defining Cyber Risk Assessment and a Compliance Gap Analysis and How They Can be Used Together

Organizations routinely encounter a myriad of cyberthreats that jeopardize their data, operations and reputation. To address these constantly evolving threats, organizations need consistent methodologies and tools to proactively identify security gaps and weaknesses.A well-designed risk assessment will empower your organization to prioritize security initiatives that have the most value and a gap analysis can help you identify non-compliance and avoid potential fines or attacks. The power is in understanding when and how to apply the right tool at the right time.

What is a Cyber Risk Assessment?

A cyber risk assessment is a tool that helps organizations identify and prioritize risks associated with threats that are relevant to their unique environment. It’s a systematic process of identifying likely threats, analyzing controls designed to address those threats, evaluating the associated consequences of any identified gaps or weaknesses, assigning a risk based on likelihood and impact and identifying controls (preventative or detective) that can help to mitigate them.

Types of Cyber Risk Assessments

A risk assessment is a methodology that can be applied to a number of things. Changing the threats you evaluate your controls against is the key to creating the appropriate assessment. Examples include:

• IT risk assessment: Identification and prioritization of threats within technical systems and networks.
• Vendor risk assessment: Identification and prioritization of risks within the supply chain and security posture evaluation of key supply chain partners. Likely threats include too much access, data leakage, insecure code or products and backdoors.
• Physical security risk assessment: Identification of key concerns and risks pertaining to physical security. Key threats include unauthorized access, data leakage and denial of service.
• Cloud security risk assessment: Comprehensive review of existing security controls as well as visibility into the strengths and weaknesses of cloud architecture. Key threats include compliance, insecure configurations and shadow IT.
• Compliance framework-based risk assessment: Evaluate whether cybersecurity measures comply with the framework requirements and mitigate threats that could lead to potential security incidents.

Benefits of Cyber Risk Assessments

Cyber risk assessments help organizations in numerous ways. They help identify security priorities, help businesses gain a clearer understanding of their risk posture; enable business leaders to make informed investment decisions; improve compliance with regulations and reduce the risk of fines and other legal issues; boost stakeholder confidence in cybersecurity and enable cost savings through the avoidance of potential cybersecurity blunders and incidents.

When To Conduct a Cyber Risk Assessment?

A risk assessment can be conducted in various business use cases such as:

• When facing a new potential threat: A targeted assessment can be used to evaluate whether an organization has effective defenses against a particular threat.
• Annual Planning: Broad-based assessment identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities in infrastructure, people and processes on an annual basis is a great way to develop your annual priorities.
• Before your audits: Most regulatory frameworks require an annual risk assessment, so get them done before any annual audit.
• Business continuity planning: Running a risk assessment to identify critical functions and assets and to gauge potential risks to business continuity.
• Mergers and acquisitions: Conducting an assessment to evaluate the security posture and the compliance status of a potential company acquisition.
• Product development: Assessing risks in the software development cycle as well as new products and services.
• Change management: Evaluating risks when making significant changes and updates to architecture, systems, processes and technologies (such as a business systems transformation project).
• As needed: A customized assessment can be developed to tackle any issue. For example, If you identify access to sensitive information as an issue, then start to assess your systems that store sensitive information.

What is a Cybersecurity Gap Analysis?

 A gap analysis provides organizations with a comprehensive view of the initiatives needed to achieve compliance or alignment with a security goal or standard. A typical gap analysis report will highlight the weaknesses and variances that exist between current security controls, performance or capabilities, versus desired outcomes, best practices or industry-accepted standards. Reports might also include a risk rating against the identified gaps (for prioritization) and provide actionable recommendations to bridge the gaps, including timelines and responsibilities for implementing changes.

Types of Cybersecurity Gap Analysis

Gap analysis comes in many different types including:

• Compliance gap analysis: Map controls and processes to compliance requirements like HITRUST, GLBA, SOX, CMMC,, to identify gaps and shortcomings.
• Security gap analysis: Perform a gap analysis against best practices or major frameworks such as CIS Controls, NIST CSF, ISO 27001,
• Data protection gap analysis: Compare current data protection measures against best practices and regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, etc.
• Cloud security gap analysis: Identify gaps in cloud security and architecture compared to frameworks like CSA CCM and NIST SP 500-291.
• Configurations gap analysis: Compare current configurations against known best practices and policy requirements.
• Policy gap analysis: Compare controls against policy requirements.

Benefits of a Cybersecurity Gap Analysis

Since a gap analysis compares the current state of cybersecurity with a target state, it is particularly helpful in identifying missing controls, processes, policies, infrastructure or skills. For example, it can help pinpoint areas in incident response processes that may be lacking or need more robust preparation. It can help highlight shortcomings in application security or secure software development processes (when benchmarked to frameworks such as SSDLC and SSDF).

When to Conduct a Cybersecurity Gap Analysis?

A gap analysis can be deployed in scenarios such as:

• When responding to regulatory changes: Identifying gaps in current security controls and approaches in response to changes in regulation.
• When preparing for compliance audits: Ensure all necessary security measures and protocols are in place before a formal audit.
• When developing or updating a security policy: Assessing existing security policies for comprehensiveness.
• When acquiring a new company: Finding security gaps that need to be addressed in the target company.

The Main Difference Between a Cyber Risk Assessment and a Gap Analysis

The fundamental difference between a gap analysis and a risk assessment is that a risk assessment can be tailored to be more relevant to an organization’s unique set of threats against its unique technical and business environment, helping the business prepare for current and developing threats.

A gap analysis identifies discrepancies between current cybersecurity practices and desired cybersecurity practices. A risk assessment is also more focused on the impact and likelihood of events happening, which helps prioritize remediation activities.

How These Two Tools Can Be Used Together

How often a gap analysis is performed depends largely on the maturity of your program; as maturity rises, the frequency may drop off a bit. I would recommend performing them once or twice a year to start, but then every two years may be appropriate as the information security program matures. A comprehensive risk assessment should be performed at least once a year, as required by many of the current frameworks, but limited-scope risk assessments should be performed regularly as your program matures.

Using your compliance framework as input for the risk assessment is a great way to kill two birds with one stone and save time and money. The gap analysis will be risk-rated to assist in the prioritization of your gap remediation planning.

Note: Compliance frameworks don’t evolve and update as fast as the threat environment, so consider adding additional threats to your assessments as they develop.

Risk Assessment Success Tips

Remediation is the goal. Getting and maintaining priority on security remediations can be a challenge, but there are a few tips to help make sure they are successful:

• The business owns business risk – Information Security does not own all risk. If your business partner owns the people, process or technology with a finding, then that business partner owns the risk. Getting the business to accept their risk is key to achieving the desired outcomes.
• It must be well documented – a nice well-formatted document of the facts that identifies the risks and owners will help bring a professional look and feel to your process.
• Technology can ease the burden – there is often quite a bit of overhead and data involved in risk assessments and remediation. A purpose-built tool can help implement an automated process and produce quality reporting.

Risk management techniques are not just optional exercises but essential tools that help organizations avoid business disruptions by strengthening defenses, maintaining compliance, adapting to an ever-evolving threat landscape and making informed decisions. Risk assessments and gap analyses should be a common practice, organizations should leverage these tools whenever there’s a significant organizational change, an emerging threat, or an update to a compliance mandate or regulation.