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Four Questions Your Board Will Ask You About Cyber Risk

Board members today are increasingly concerned with cybersecurity risks. Recent Gartner research found “Eighty-eight percent of Boards of Directors (BoDs) view cybersecurity as a business risk, as opposed to a technology risk, according to a new survey* from Gartner, Inc.” It’s not surprising given the increase in threats and vulnerabilities, and the expanding regulatory demands. Board members and leadership must engage in these critical conversations to make sure their organizations are minimizing risk and have a plan for the eventuality of a cyber incident.  Here are the top 4 questions you should expect board members to ask you, and how you can best answer them. 

1. What are the biggest risks to our organization today and what are we doing to mitigate them? 

Your job as a cybersecurity leader is to manage cybersecurity risk, which includes identifying, treating, and monitoring your overall threat landscape. Your response should include results of a comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessment that was recently conducted through an automated platform solution. By employing an automated platform solution, you can continue to monitor and manage cyber risk more continuously to identify new threats and vulnerabilities to the organization as they develop, than compared to point in time assessments. The platform should present the top risk scenarios to your organization, the associated threats and vulnerabilities that inform risk levels. 

2. How are we spending our current cybersecurity budget and is it going to the right places? 

Justifying cybersecurity budgets can be challenging without having the right risk insights. Using an Integrated Cyber Risk Management platform solution with a financial impact view, you can instantly calculate the annualized loss expectancy (ALE) for your top risk scenarios since the solution can assess your IT environment to discovery and identify the asset inventory of the organization for classification and reporting. This will serve as a cost-benefit analysis, which will help you justify cyber insurance policy purchases and your security budget.  

3. How are we assessing and mitigating inherent risks linked to third parties? 

Third-party risk management is a critical component of enterprise risk management. Leveraging a platform solution to assess and monitor third-party risk is the first step, and using an automated solution that measures the risk of those third-parties based on attack surface assessments for vulnerabilities is an even better first step. This method provides up-to-date and accurate information on the actual vulnerabilities of third-party environments linked to your systems. Collaborating with that third party on mitigating inherent risk to your organization requires engaging key resources at the company. This can only be achieved using the platform that provides automated cyber risk assessments, ongoing monitoring, and task collaboration capabilities. 

4. How are we benchmarking against peer organizations? 

Although every organization’s security posture is set up differently, benchmarking is a good way to identify how organizations are managing their risk profiles. This data is available in an Integrated Cyber Risk Management platform solution. You will be able to benchmark against specific organizations in similar industries or against the national average of that industry. 

Are you curious as to what an Integrated Cyber Risk Management platform solution can do for your cyber risk management strategy and facilitate board level conversations? Learn more about how the FortifyData platform enables you to identify and manage your risk exposure across your entire attack surface, including external, internal, cloud configuration, and third-party risks. Through both active and passive assessments, you get the most current and accurate visibility of risks your organization is exposed to.  Register here for a demo.

*The 2022 Gartner Board of Directors Survey was conducted via an online survey from May through June 2021 among 273 respondents in the U.S., Europe and APAC in a board of director role or a member of the corporate board of directors.