It is no doubt that organizations today have to go to extreme measures to protect themselves from a rapidly changing and an increasingly threatening range of information security risk. An unnoticed information security risk will cause long term problems that will have a bearing on the future of the company’s stature in the market. A risk assessment process that can identify risks to specific information assets will help the organization in making information security investment and control decisions in the future.
Information security will have many wings such as Protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, disruption, disclosure, use or destruction . Risk could be defined as the possibility of a threat agent that takes advantage of the defenselessness and the impact it would have on the business. Trying read, modify or delete important data would be recognised as security risks for a business firm. In order to protect the information assets, information security management processes have been put in place.
It is understandable that not all the information require the same level of high security. Therefore measuring the importance of the information is important.There should be a head or in other words an administrator for a database. Normalization and grading of the information will help to protect data according to its importance. Some common labels used by businesses today are public sensitive, private and confidential. It is vital that all employees of an organization are trained on the classification and understanding of the required security controls and handling procedures for each classification of information.
Compared to assessing other types of risks, information security risks can be more difficult because of the costs involved with information security risk factors and the data probability are most often limited as well due to the rapid changes of risk factors. Costs are naturaly difficult to measure hence will go unnoticed. When new controls are implemented there will be some other overhead costs such as built time cost and run time costs.Due to the increase in dramatic and constant changes in information security risk it is essential that organizations update their security systems frequently with better risk management controls.