Any kind of risk to your organization’s data assets –be it related to network security, physical security, third-party vendors, application security, or compliance –is a risk to its business continuity. Data security threats can hamper the continuity of any organization’s business operations and lead to loss of money as well as the trust of your customers. Clearly, remediation of business continuity risks must be made the topmost priority when a risk becomes live.

Integrating business continuity risks with remediation keeps your organization secure in a more efficient manner. Here are some steps you should follow to integrate business continuity risks with remediation in your organization:

Integration is a part of business continuity risk assessment

Business continuity risk assessment is the first step in the security workflow of any organization. Assigning remediation measures for each identified risk is also an important subtask in business continuity risk assessment. Therefore, a thorough business continuity risk assessment automatically integrates risks with remediation.

Use questionnaires

A good technique to understand the progress of security operations in any organization is to ask your security and other staff to answer questions related to business continuity risks and the state of ongoing or planned remediation efforts. If the business continuity risks and remediation measures are assessed simultaneously in such questionnaires, you can easily integrate these two aspects of information security in your organization.

Increase the visibility of business continuity risks and remediation

For the success of remediation efforts in any organization, it is important to have complete visibility of all business continuity risks as well as the corresponding remediation efforts. Increased visibility helps you appropriately assign and track the remediation steps for any given business continuity risk. Therefore, increasing the visibility of business continuity risks and remediation is an important way to integrate the two.

Conduct remediation analysis

Remediation analysis helps you recheck the vulnerability of your data assets and business continuity after imminent risks have been remediated. When conducting a remediation analysis, go through each risk and its corresponding remediation measure and decide if further remediation action is necessary to eliminate the risk. This helps integrate all risks with their corresponding remediation measures.

Automate your business continuity planning

Using an automated platform to manage your information security, physical security, vendor, and compliance risks are the best way to integrate business continuity risks with remediation. Automation achieves all of the steps discussed above on a single software platform. It increases visibility, eases resource allocation, helps perform risk and remediation assessments, and facilitates the use of questionnaires to analyze the status of your organization’s security posture and business continuity. This makes automation a robust, easy-to-use and inexpensive way for integration.

Conclusion

Your business continuity is highly dependent on your organization’s security framework. However, this security framework is constantly tested by malicious intruders and hackers aiming to steal and misuse your customer and employee data. Follow the above-mentioned steps for integrating business continuity risks in your organization with their remediation in order to ensure a smooth security workflow.

• (This "Security Blogs" Published in January 2024  Edition)