In an era defined by increasing digital interconnectivity, organizations face unprecedented challenges in identifying, measuring, and managing cyber risks. The complex mesh of digital systems, underpinned by a growing reliance on third-party technologies, has created convoluted environments that are harder to protect and easier to exploit. Now more than ever, business and security leaders need to proactively manage cyber risk in order to achieve their organization’s strategic goals. The trouble is that boards of directors, CEOs, CISOs, and their government counterparts need better ways to measure, manage, and report cyber risk.
The growing digitalization of modern business often overwhelms security and risk management leaders with data and information from monitoring tools. The governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) approaches that most enterprises use today routinely fail to aggregate and contextualize insights from those data sources because they don’t use analytical risk models. GRC-based approaches provide only a vague understanding of an organization’s risk posture, limiting visibility and fidelity into an enterprise’s risk profile. That, in turn, prevents leaders from developing the meaningful insights needed to inform decisions. Without a scalable, technology-enabled analytical risk model, business and security leaders simply cannot make data-driven, risk-informed business decisions.
The shortcomings of traditional risk measurement methods, which rely on qualitative and subjective metrics, compound this problem. These conventional risk approaches struggle to effectively aggregate and interpret data meaningfully, leaving security leaders without objective, quantifiable metrics to articulate risk in financial terms. As a result, enterprises often prioritize control compliance (e.g., NIST CSF maturity scores) over accurately assessing actual risk. They miss opportunities to use analytical models to bolster their cybersecurity and risk management strategies.
