What is risk framework management and how does it help organizations in managing risk to an acceptable level?
Risk framework management is a structured process for identifying, assessing, evaluating, mitigating and managing risks to organizational assets. There are numerous risk frameworks in information security that organizations can adopt to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks. Risk frameworks can serve as a foundation for frameworks that organizations may customize to suite their unique needs. This means, organizations should not develop and manage their own risk frameworks from scratch rather should rely on existing risk frameworks to address their requirements of risk management endeavors. This approach will help organizations to have feature rich and mature risk frameworks instead of relying on some framework that is not well tested and evaluated internationally. In addition, this is cost effective and easy to map various qualities of different risk frameworks to the organizational needs.
Risk framework management helps organizations to address assessments, control and monitoring requirements, evaluation and auditing of information and information systems. Moreover, the overall objective of all risk frameworks is to enable internal security controls and processes to bring risk to acceptable level. There are different international and industry-specific risk frameworks that organizations can adopt depending on the nature of their business requirements.
Unique characteristics of risk framework management should include features such as:
- Standardized
- Consistent
- Measurable
- Comprehensive
- Modular
There are dozens of risk framework management that organizations can adopt to meet their risk management requirements. The following are some of the most popular risk frameworks in use in cybersecurity:
- ISO 31000:2018
- ISO/IEC 27005:2011, “Information technology— Security techniques — Information security risk management”
- NIST Special Publication 800-37,“Guide for Applying the Risk Management Framework to Federal Information Systems”
- COBIT 5
- TOGAF
The most comprehensive risk management framework (RMF) from NIST (NIST Special Publication 800-37) has the following main components:
- Prepare
- Categorize
- Select
- Implement
- Assess
- Authorize
- Monitor