What is a Cyber Security Risk Assessment?
A Cyber Security Risk Assessment involves identifying vulnerabilities, evaluating potential threats, and implementing strategies to mitigate risk posed by cyber threats.
It’s a significant undertaking but one that can become invaluable by providing you with a comprehensive overview of your IT environment and a customised action plan to help strengthen your security.
Maintaining high security standards across your organisation allows your teams to operate with confidence, protects sensitive data from breaches, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and builds trust with clients and stakeholders.
By implementing the following steps, you’ll be able to produce your own thorough and effective Cyber Security Risk Assessment.
Why is it important to conduct a cyber risk assessment?
As cyber threats continue to evolve in sophistication and scale, organisations of all sizes are challenged with navigating an increasingly complex and dynamic security landscape. In fact, one quarter admitted to being breached in the last 12 months.
To help protect your organisation, it’s essential that you implement a multi-layered security approach, one that combines robust tools with a strong security-first culture. When it comes to cyber security, your journey should begin with a comprehensive cyber security risk assessment, as it lays the foundation for everything that follows.
What to expect from a well-executed cyber risk assessment
- Clarity on Your Risk Exposure: Identify vulnerabilities across your systems, processes, and people before attackers do. Gaining a clear view of your risk landscape helps you prioritise what matters most.
- Informed Decision-Making: With actionable insights, you can allocate resources more effectively, invest in the right security controls, and align your cyber security strategy with business goals.
- Regulatory Confidence: Stay ahead of compliance requirements and demonstrate due diligence to regulators, partners, and customers. A documented risk assessment is often a key requirement for industry standards and certifications.
- Incident Preparedness: Understand your organisation’s ability to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents. The assessment highlights gaps and strengthens your incident response posture.
- Cost Avoidance: Proactively addressing risks is far more cost-effective than reacting to a breach. A single incident can lead to financial loss, reputational damage, and legal consequences.
Considerations Before Performing a Cyber security Risk Assessment
Before beginning a cyber security risk assessment, it’s important to lay the groundwork. A thoughtful approach ensures the process is efficient, focused, and delivers meaningful outcomes.
Here are key factors to consider:
Define the Scope
Determine whether you need to assess your entire organisation or focus on specific systems, departments, or third-party vendors, with a well-defined scope that keeps the assessment targeted and manageable.
Understand Your Business Objectives
Cyber security should support, not hinder your business goals. Aligning the assessment with your strategic priorities ensures that security investments deliver tangible value.
Know Your Assets
Take stock of your physical and digital assets, including data, infrastructure, applications, and user access. You can’t protect what you don’t know you have.
Engage the Right Stakeholders
Risk assessments aren’t just an IT exercise, they involve leadership, legal, compliance, and operational teams to get a complete picture of risk and impact.
Choose the Right Framework
Whether it’s NIST, ISO 27001, or any other standard, selecting a recognised framework provides structure and credibility to your assessment.
Plan for Action
A risk assessment is only valuable if it leads to action. Be ready to prioritise findings, allocate resources, and implement improvements based on the results.
6 steps to perform a cyber security risk assessment
Step 1: Understand Your IT Environment
The first step is to gain a clear understanding of your current IT landscape. This involves looking at the devices your team uses, the software and applications that support your operations, and the systems that store and manage your data.
It’s also important to assess how user identities are managed and how secure your cloud infrastructure is. As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into business processes, you should also consider whether your systems are ready to support AI securely.
Completing this foundational step helps you identify where your digital assets are and how well they’re currently protected.
Step 2: Check for Compliance Gaps
As part of your cyber vulnerability assessment, it is recommended that you evaluate how well your current setup aligns with widely recognised frameworks such as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), CIS Controls, developed by the Center for Internet Security and ISO 27001, to provide clear benchmarks for best practices.
You can build your strategy around each of these, but we believe aligning cyber security layers using NIST and CIS initially will ensure you have many of the technical and procedural controls in place, making the ISO 27001 gap analysis and implementation much smoother.
The NIST framework as an example, is designed to help organisations improve their cyber security posture and is especially useful for identifying compliance gaps. It’s not something you achieve, but rather a framework to help align your cyber security strategy and is a great way to build a layered security approach across all of your infrastructure.
The framework is built around five core functions:
- Identify – Understand your environment and manage cyber security risks to systems, assets, data, and capabilities.
- Protect – Put safeguards in place to ensure delivery of critical services.
- Detect – Develop activities to identify cyber security events quickly.
- Respond – Take action on detected cyber security incidents.
- Recover – Maintain plans for resilience and restore capabilities after an incident.
Identifying and addressing any compliance gaps not only helps you avoid regulatory issues but also demonstrates your commitment to security to clients, partners, and stakeholders.
The CIS Controls are a set of best practices designed to help organisations improve their cyber security posture.
CIS Critical Security Controls (CIS Controls) include:
- Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets: Manage and track all enterprise assets to ensure they are monitored and protected.
- Inventory and Control of Software Assets: Ensure only authorised software is installed and executed.
- Data Protection: Implement processes and technical controls to securely handle and dispose of data.
- Secure Configuration of Enterprise Assets and Software: Maintain secure configurations for all enterprise assets and software.
- Account Management: Manage authorisation credentials for user accounts.
- Access Control Management: Manage and revoke access credentials and privileges.
- Continuous Vulnerability Management: Continuously assess and track vulnerabilities.
- Audit Log Management: Collect and review audit logs to detect and understand attacks.
- Email and Web Browser Protections: Enhance protections against threats from email and web vectors.
- Malware Defence: Implement measures to defend against malware.
- Network Infrastructure Management: Securely manage network infrastructure.
- Network Monitoring and Defence: Monitor and defend the network in real-time.
- Security Awareness and Skills Training: Educate users on security best practices.
- Service Provider Management: Manage security aspects of third-party service providers.
- Application Software Security: Ensure secure coding practices for application software.
- Incident Response Management: Develop and implement incident response plans.
- Penetration Testing: Conduct regular security assessments.
- Data Recovery: Implement disaster recovery plans.
Aligning with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and then implementing CIS Controls within your security and infrastructure can be a highly effective strategy.
By leveraging both frameworks, you can create a comprehensive and resilient cybersecurity strategy that addresses both high-level goals and specific actions.
Step 3: Review Past Incidents and Threat Exposure
Once you’ve mapped out your environment, take time to review any previous cyber incidents your organisation has experienced. This could include data breaches, phishing attacks, or malware infections.
76% of SMEs report cyber incidents to senior management, but only 58% keep internal records according to GOV UK.
Keeping records is crucial, here’s why:
- Stay compliant with laws like GDPR
- Respond faster and recover smarter
- Learn from past breaches
- Support insurance claims
- Protect your reputation
- Train your team better
It’s also worth checking whether any of your business credentials have been exposed on the dark web. Analysing past events can reveal patterns in how your systems have been targeted and highlight areas that may still be vulnerable. Learning from these incidents is key to preventing similar issues in the future.
Step 4: Prioritise the Risks You Discover
After identifying potential vulnerabilities, the next step is to assess which ones pose the greatest risk. Some threats may be more likely to occur, while others could have more severe consequences if they do.
To make your prioritisation more effective, consider using a simple scale, such as Low, Medium, and High for both likelihood and impact. Here’s how you might define them:
Likelihood
- Low: Rare or unlikely to happen based on current controls or history
- Medium: Possible under certain conditions or has occurred occasionally
- High: Likely to happen soon or has occurred frequently in similar contexts
Impact
- Minor: Minimal disruption or easily recoverable
- Moderate: Noticeable disruption requiring some recovery effort
- Severe: Severe consequences, including financial loss, legal issues, or reputational damage
By evaluating both the likelihood and the potential impact of each risk, you can determine which issues need immediate attention and which can be addressed over time. You can also use a risk matrix to visually map and compare risks, helping you decide which ones to tackle first. This helps ensure your efforts are focused where they’ll have the most meaningful impact.
Having an understanding how actual attacks unfolded can also help you better assess the risks you identify.
Synnovis-NHS Ransomware Attack (2024)
In June 2024, a pathology services provider for several NHS trusts in London was hit by a ransomware attack that severely disrupted blood testing and diagnostics. Thousands of appointments and procedures were delayed or cancelled, affecting patient care across the capital.
- Likelihood: Healthcare systems are frequent targets due to legacy systems and high-value data, making this a medium to high likelihood event.
- Impact: The consequences were severe, with direct effects on patient safety, operational continuity, and public trust.
This case highlights how even well-known vulnerabilities, if not addressed, can lead to critical service disruptions.
Step 5: Create a Tailored Action Plan
With your priorities in place, you can now develop a practical and tailored action plan. This roadmap should outline the steps your organisation needs to take to reduce risk, from quick fixes like updating outdated software to longer-term strategies such as implementing new security protocols or providing staff training.
- The plan should be realistic
- Aligned with your business goals
- Designed to integrate smoothly with your existing operations
Document and Report Findings
Summarise your cyber threat assessment in a clear, actionable report. Include a risk register, recommended actions, timelines, and who’s responsible. Tailor the report to your audience, providing executives with a high-level overview and IT teams with detailed technical information.
Step 6: Review and Update Regularly
Cyber threats are constantly evolving, so it’s important to keep your risk assessment up to date. It is recommended that you:
- Review it at least once a year
- After any major changes to your systems
- If a security incident occurs
By conducting regular updates, it allows you to stay prepared and continuously improve your defences.
How can we help?
A cyber threat assessment is more than just a technical exercise; it is a business priority that helps protect your organisation from evolving threats. By understanding your environment, learning from past incidents, prioritising risks, planning improvements, and ensuring compliance, you can build a stronger, more resilient business that’s ready for whatever comes next.
If you’re unsure where to start or need expert guidance, our expert team is here to help. We offer a comprehensive Cyber Security Risk Assessment tailored to your needs and are dedicated to delivering the highest standards of cyber security.
Not only do we use top-tier tools and expert knowledge to conduct our Cyber Security Risk Assessment, but we also take the time to listen and understand your organisation, ensuring we provide you with the most suitable recommendations.
