Your company’s first external audit can be a bit overwhelming. The audit firm will seek a considerable amount of audit evidence from your business – and if you want to prepare for that compliance audit in advance, there’s an equally vast amount of information available about how audits should work. Every company’s audit experience will differ, depending on the scope and the standard against which you will be audited.

Any organization that uses information technology should conduct cybersecurity risk assessments from time to time. Each organization, however, faces its own unique set of security risks and needs to tailor its approach to addressing those specific risks within its risk management processes. To get started, you first need to identify all your organization’s IT assets, which might be subject to those risks.

External and internal audits generate better insight into your data security, yet most employees flee from the process. Audits are cumbersome, time-consuming, and often feel peripheral to most people’s daily workload. Yet, several benefits of internal auditing make it a critical component of the long-term sustainability of your organization. However, mastering an efficient workflow for your audit management process, including risk-based internal audits, can make a significant difference.

Efficient procurement is crucial to the success of any corporate organization. Hence, companies should consider strategies for effective vendor risk management. Strategic Vendor Management (SVM) continuously monitors and improves vendor relationships and exchanges. If a vendor performs only one task, SVM asks you to have that vendor perform multiple tasks instead, allowing for cost savings and mitigating cybersecurity risks.

Data drives the modern economy. The right type, amount, and quality of data lets organizations better understand their customers. This understanding enables companies to build more accurate customer profiles, design personalized marketing programs, refine retention strategies, and nurture meaningful long-term customer relationships. Simply collecting this data, however, is not enough. Data only becomes valuable when it is transformed into insightful information.

Third-party data breaches can happen at any time to any organization. This type of breach occurs when a vendor (or some other business partner) holding your company’s data suffers a breach, and your data is exposed. According to the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, 62 percent of all data breaches happen via third-party vendors.

There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all cybersecurity. Every organization faces a unique set of security risks, and needs to take its own unique approach to cybersecurity risk assessment. Unfortunately, however, cybersecurity risk assessments aren’t easy to undertake, and getting started can be the most challenging part of your risk management strategy. To help, we’ll take you through the process step by step.

Every business decision involves an element of risk. Management’s job is to assess that level of risk as best as possible, and to weigh that risk correctly against the potential rewards. That risk-versus-reward equation is the basis for taking calculated risks, often referred to as your “risk-adjusted return on investment.” So how should an executive team approach this process?

Organizations today are at greater risk of a cyberattack than ever before, and that risk will only grow as new technologies keep emerging in the future. That means an ever greater need for cybersecurity risk management — that is, the process of identifying, analyzing, prioritizing, and mitigating your organization’s cybersecurity risks.

Security compliance management is that set of policies, procedures, and other internal controls that an organization uses to fulfill its regulatory requirements for data privacy and protection. Put another way, security compliance management is a subset of regulatory compliance management that specifically addresses data protection. Clearly security compliance management is important.