Risk Assessment

Because your business is constantly exposed to IT security threats on a regular basis, you know that you need to do something to protect your corporate IT environment. NETCORE, an IT consulting firm with extensive IT security experience, recommends that your company perform a risk assessment every three years as part of a comprehensive corporate IT security plan.

Identify Your Risks
Assessing your company's IT security risks is a practice that, when incorporated into your company's comprehensive security plan, will help protect your IT environment, your data, and your company's reputation. Typically, an impartial, third-party assessment done by an IT consulting company is the best group to provide your company with an IT risk assessment because they are impartial and will not make any assumptions about your systems. IT companies that have experience with comprehensive IT security solutions agree that a proper risk assessment should do the following:
  • Identify potential threats
  • Evaluate possible damage
  • Define solutions for possible damage
  • Create a plan to fix identified weaknesses
A well-constructed risk assessment, when performed by a qualified IT support company, can help your business identify and defend against potential IT security threats. When your company chooses to conduct an IT security risk assessment, NETCORE encourages that it follow the industry standard nine-step program to ensure that all of your corporate IT assets are protected.
  1. System Characterization- involves evaluating and documenting your company's entire IT environment, including all software, hardware, and data.
  2. Threat Identification- involves identifying all potential threats to your company, and will take into account previous assessments and corporate history.
  3. Vulnerability Identification- includes developing a list of your business' system flaws and weaknesses that could be exploited by potential threats.
  4. Control Analysis- involves listing and analyzing the safeguards and procedures that have been planned or implemented to minimize or eliminate threats to your IT environment.
  5. Probability Determination- requires identifying the probability that any potential vulnerability can be exploited based on all of the information previously analyzed.
  6. Impact Analysis- consists of ranking identified risks and their potential damage to your corporation.
  7. Risk Determination- combines the results of the Probability Determination and the Impact Analysis to identify the calculated risks that each potential threat poses to your IT environment.
  8. Recommendations- provide solutions that could mitigate or eliminate identified risks to your corporate IT environment.
  9. Results Documentation- requires creating a comprehensive report that identifies the results of the assessment and is designed to assist your company's management team in making sound, informed decisions regarding your corporate policies, procedures, budget, and IT environment.

Get Help
Completing a successful risk assessment can be a daunting task to execute because it depends upon the participation of all your corporate IT users. The IT risk assessment experts at NETCORE have been completing corporate IT risk assessments for more than ten years and would be happy to discuss the process with you. To learn more about risk assessments in general or to learn more about how an assessment completed by IT security experts can help your company's comprehensive IT security plan, please contact NETCORE at (866) 822-4669..