You are here. A thorough threat and vulnerability assessment can serve as a roadmap to stronger business continuity and operational resilience. Yet today’s topography is riddled with shifting threats. To keep on course, risk management and security professionals need a way to stay oriented and anticipate what’s around the next bend.
Historical risk data shows the bigger picture, complete with signposts that help security and continuity managers conduct a more effective and comprehensive threat assessment. Data about past events can inform critical decisions around:
- Specific security standards across assets and employees
- Optimal resource allocation to limit and mitigate threats
- A standardized approach to threats across the organization
- Regulatory compliance
- Market expansion and new facility siting
- Employee duty of care obligations
Do you have what you need to get there?
While 99 percent of corporate boards have asked their top executives about plans to combat physical threats, 60 percent of CEOs have no plan to address the most severe physical threats to their business, according to the 2023 OnSolve Global Risk Impact Report.
Ready to plan a smoother journey? A threat and vulnerability assessment supported by OnSolve technology can pave the way.
OnSolve Risk Insights
Equip your security and business continuity teams with historical threat data from OnSolve Risk Insights so they can make informed risk-based decisions.
3 Routes to a Better Threat Assessment with Historical Risk Data
1. Know Where You’ve Been (Risk Identification and Threat Data Review)
Risk identification is more than simply listing immediate concerns. Patterns of prior events, responses to them and the resulting impacts all have a bearing on present-day operations and business continuity.
Historical risk data can help create a more thorough and comprehensive threat assessment by determining which critical events pose the most serious risk to your people and operations, as well as profitability and reputation. It can uncover relevant trends by examining historical threat data and statistics to answer questions such as:
- What risks did we face during a given time period?
- How severe were these risks?
- Have those risks changed?
- Are there now secondary risks?
Historical risk data analysis enables users to easily sort and filter data by specific regions and timeframes, and highly granular information can be viewed, including comparisons and statistics. Knowing where the bumps in the road have previously occurred, risk and security managers can move more confidently into the next step of assessing their existing levels of preparedness.
2. Know Where You Are (Current Preparedness and Risk Impact Analysis)
With the risks identified, the next step is to evaluate your organization’s level of preparedness for the critical events most likely to impact you. Comparing impacts of previous threats with existing protocols for response, containment and mitigation can facilitate a more accurate analysis of preparedness.
During this phase, a range of questions can serve as waypoints, including:
- Do we need more physical security at a particular location, and, if so, what kind?
- How should our standard operating procedures be structured or revised?
- Has our staff been familiarized with the prevalent threats to the business?
- Will they also be able to respond appropriately in unexpected situations?
- Are we sufficiently insured for the full range of potential resulting damages?
In every industry, all these questions circle back to the big picture goal: Ensure current levels of preparedness are adequate to keep operations running, maintain employee safety and ensure overall business continuity. Data-driven decisions provide the greatest likelihood of achieving those objectives. The information is out there. It’s a matter of finding and applying it.
By leveraging historical risk data, security and business continuity professionals can record, track and define risks across the organization. Comprehensive and easily digested reports make it easy to identify top concerns and overall risk trends based on the critical events most prevalent in a geographical area.
The ability to zero in on event type and severity gives risk managers a way to drill down to the level of detail needed for an effective business impact analysis. The result? Roadblocks can be avoided for strategic integration of crisis prevention, response and management.
3. Know Where You’re Going (Risk Control Policies and Procedures)
Now that risks and their impacts are correlated to planning and preparation, it’s time to set control policies and procedures to improve future outcomes. The goals of this step revolve around ensuring:
- All departments maintain a proactive security approach.
- Commitment to best practices is consistent.
- Informational siloes are removed and process gaps are filled.
- Proposed implementation timelines and schedules are achieved.
- Budgeting stays on track.
Recommendations to support these goals will likely involve implementing various organizational changes, as well as investing in new technology, additional equipment and supplemental training. To justify the return on investment and gain buy-in from the C-suite, risk managers need to supply supporting data.
Historical risk data enables security and business continuity professionals to better understand exposure to risk. The ability to export that data into other applications makes it simple to create presentations for leadership that clearly demonstrate the basis for recommendations. Risk managers can provide evidence as to why certain investments are smart business decisions that will reduce future risk exposure.
Set Your Compass to True North
A threat analysis doesn’t have to be an uphill climb filled with dead ends and detours. OnSolve Risk Insights is an innovative and industry-leading historical threat reporting solution.
Sourced from our analyst-vetted, AI-powered Risk Intelligence that features tens of thousands of verified sources globally and years of historical reports of risk events, Risk Insights fuels data-driven security decisions. Risk professionals can quickly generate targeted reports and narrow research based on date and time or region, all from an intuitive dashboard.
When reliable risk data is the foundation of your threat and vulnerability assessment, you can accelerate the analysis of potential risk in order to accelerate your response and recovery. Schedule a demo to learn how OnSolve Risk Insights can point you in the direction of operational resilience.
