At Premier Networx, we offer security solutions for a secure and optimized infrastructure; our team offers clients security assessments for secure, compliant, and optimized IT infrastructure for your business or organization. IT security assessments are absolutely vital for every organization. It allows us to identify your IT systems and other resources, allowing us to understand potential threats and prioritize your solutions in the most effective way possible. 

Security assessments identify vulnerabilities in a business or organization’s IT ecosystem and understand the threats they pose to the organization; the best security assessments, like the ones provided at Premier Networx, look at everything from downtime to potential compliance penalties. Security assessments identify risks like damage to an organization’s reputation, risk of financial loss, and so on. Potential threats are things like hardware failures, human errors, DoS attacks, and so on. Because these threats are likely to happen more than once, it is important to ensure risk assessments are performed regularly!

A few benefits of conducting security assessments are laid out below:

• Understanding potential threats/risks and the probability 
• Regulatory compliance that helps your organization comply with mandates of various organizations (HIPPA, SOX, et cetera). 
• Improved trust among your customers. 
• Informed decision making throughout the organization.
• Safeguarding your business from a costly data breach.
• Identifying vulnerabilities in your organization’s IT ecosystem.
• Providing insights to where your most valuable IT assets are within your organization.

As you can see, there are several benefits to conducting a security assessment for your organization; however, you may be wondering how it works. Let us give you a quick overview of the process. 

1. Identify and prioritize IT assets; these assets are everything from client data to printers that are used within your organization. You will also identify how important each asset is to your business and operations. 
2. Identify threats and vulnerabilities; threats are anything that can cause harm to your organization. Vulnerabilities are weaknesses that can enable harm to your organization, but do not provide direct harm. 
3. Determine your existing controls to determine their effectiveness or ineffectiveness.
4. Calculate the probability of an incident; during this step, we will assess how each vulnerability may be exploited by analyzing factors such as the efficacy of your controls, capacity of your threat score, and so on. 
5. Assess the impact a threat would have on your business/organization. This step will review key factors, such as the role of each asset, the asset’s value, and the asset’s sensitivity. 
6. Prioritize risks based on their level of impact to the organization’s IT system. We use a risk-level matrix  that helps us prioritize the risks on a low to high scale. 
7. Recommend controls and document results. During this last step, we will make recommendations for controls of each asset based on their level of impact to the organization. Additionally, we will provide a comprehensive report of everything we have gathered to help the organization’s leadership make an informed decision. 

Security risk assessments can save your business a lot of money, loss of reputation, and so on. This process is the foundation of any security management strategy; if you are ready to refine your security and ensure your organization is protected, call Premier Networx today to see how we can help!