Information is collected, stored, and transmitted in private and public sectors for business purposes. That information is vulnerable to bad actors, environmental disasters, human errors, and so on. and needs protection at all states of the data lifecycle. This is where risk assessment plays a major role. Risk assessment helps to identify specific threats to an organization, vulnerabilities, and Impacts to an organization that may occur given the potential for threats exploiting vulnerabilities, the likelihood, and the risk status or severity based on likelihood and harm.

Risk assessment can be conducted at various levels, including information systems and organization. Risk assessments support the implementation of frameworks that is security categorization, control selection and monitoring, assessments, and implementations.

“NIST Publication 800-30 is to provide guidance for conducting risk assessments and 800-39 Risk assessments, carried out at all three tiers in the risk management hierarchy, are part of an overall risk management process”

Techniques:

The risk analysis can be used to determine and prioritize the risk. The well-known risk can be prioritized based on the impact score that will help to improve the organization’s security posture. Many techniques can be used for assessments, most used ones are Qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Qualitative and Quantitative: 

Qualitative Risk assessments:  risk status is based on highly skilled personnel opinions with an enterprise risk management framework.

Quantitative Risk Assessment: Risk assessment is based on data; it shows risk from a holistic perspective and is expensive to collect data from various assessment sources. This technique required data and needs to be analysed most of them for the desired outcome.

Hybrid Assessment: combined approach provides better efficiency and helps to achieve desired security posture.