The needs of businesses everywhere are changing. Thanks to the adoption of the Internet, digital data, and other technologies, cybersecurity has risen from an afterthought to a top priority for everyone. It directly impacts the bottom line, and security incidents can be costly to the budget and the trust among consumers.
To that end, we need to stop using archaic methods when dealing with business security. What we used to know as governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) often results in fragmented or siloed processes that aren’t flexible or versatile enough for the circumstances of today’s market. What we need is a more modern and integrated risk management approach.
What Is Integrated Risk Management?
Integrated risk management (IRM) is an umbrella term covering all the practices and tools a company uses for analyzing and responding to security risks. The “integrated” portion of it largely comes from technology and the software tools used to weave everything together.
IRM allows you to take a risk-centric approach to cybersecurity. In other words, you’re looking at and analyzing the risks to drive compliance, not necessarily the other way around.
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See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
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to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
The Components of an Integrated Risk Management Platform
Because every organization has a unique set of risks facing it, IRM differs from business to business. No single approach can apply to everyone, hence the importance of crafting your own integrated risk management program. Still, many approaches all share these common points:
- Identifying, assessing, and prioritizing the risks.
- Responding to those risks to mitigate them.
- Reporting on your actions and communicating them to organizational stakeholders.
- Monitoring the progress of your IRM objectives and keeping everyone accountable.
- Implementing the technology to support the cyber risk management platform.
Building a risk response initiative is about finding the right IRM framework to detect and respond to cybersecurity risks throughout the organization.
The Benefits of Integrated Risk Management
IRM tools allow companies to mitigate and manage risks holistically, a job more essential than ever in a world of overwhelming threats.
Why should it be “integrated”? You want to have full visibility into risks across the organization, its partners, and its supply chains. An integrated solution is essentially an evolution of older approaches to GRC, using technology to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the process.
The benefits extend further too. An integrated risk management automation platform promotes:
- A culture of risk awareness. Implementing IRM forces you to look at risk as an enterprise-wide consideration. Being aware of the problem is the first incremental step towards solving it. From there, you can start introducing security training and other strategies to shift the corporate culture into one that recognizes the best practices of security.
- Cross-departmental visibility. Integration helps break down organizational silos common to older businesses. It takes GRC and applies it holistically to drive better risk management and operational fluidity.
- Aggregation of relevant data. Cybersecurity comes from many sources. You have different antivirus programs and firewalls to handle, and many tools work independently of each other. By combining all this data together, you gain a more insightful picture of cyber risks.
So what drives these fully integrated workflows? The new strategies of IRM require tools that enable this level of integration. The result is a more productive cybersecurity program thanks to faster risk mitigation.
Why Is IRM Suddenly Becoming Essential?
In addition to the benefits listed above, several forces have encouraged more businesses to adopt integrated risk management.
- Globalization. Many companies operate internationally now, and geopolitical problems can have an impact on how we do business.
- Digitization of the workforce. From the Internet of Things trend to social media, our attachment to the online world has made us more productive and connected than ever before but also more susceptible to privacy issues and other risks.
- Reliance on third-parties. It’s a common strategy to modularize business tools by outsourcing them to third-party providers. While more cost-effective and easy to use, working with service providers also introduces a possibility of data leaks since you’re sharing sensitive information remotely.
- Stronger regulations. Governments worldwide are starting to understand the risk that customers today are facing and have enacted regulations like the EU’s GDPR and the medical industry’s HIPAA to protect them. Integrated compliance has been a strong talking point as a result.
Regardless, it should be obvious now why IRM should be a top priority for companies, regardless of size or industry.
Putting It All Together
We started with GRC, the rules and policies for dealing with cybersecurity. It was sufficient for many years until digitization made us more productive but also more exposed. Today, smart businesses know that GRC and technology go hand-in-hand.
An integrated risk management solution is your best weapon against a world of digital threats. Start thinking about IRM if you want to stay competitive in the future.
Start Getting Value With
Centraleyes for Free
See for yourself how the Centraleyes platform exceeds anything an old GRC
system does and eliminates the need for manual processes and spreadsheets
to give you immediate value and run a full risk assessment in less than 30 days
