How SPARQ Helps Healthcare Organizations Quantify Cyber Risk
SPARQ includes a platform solution that leverages artificial intelligence and provides real-time updates on an organization’s quantified risk assessment so that it’s not a one-time event but an ongoing process that can help organizations develop a more mature cybersecurity program.
From a storytelling point of view, it’s the opposite of a compliance checkbox. Rather than having outside insurers or surveys inform an organization’s risk assessment, we take an inside-out look to discover what makes the most difference for an organization’s unique situation, what aspects will buy down the most risk and which areas will be the best place to invest.
After the assessment, organizations won’t have to stumble through the 24 findings to know what they should tackle first. With SPARQ, each risk is assigned a dollar value, so the conversation can start with, “This particular project costs $200,000, but it buys down $9 million for a year’s worth of risk.” That then pushes into discussions about where organizations can invest to buy down the most risk, or move the needle for capital versus operational expenditures, or help the CFO hit an earnings target. It allows security teams to speak in the language of business.
READ MORE: Follow this five-step action plan for achieving clinical care resilience.
Traditionally, CISOs have not been great at communicating the same way the CEO or CFO talks to the board. With SPARQ, they can start to use that dollars-and-cents framing to say, “These are the risks, and these are the trade-offs, and this is the investment mix that we want to make.”
In the past, as security leaders, we’ve walked into board rooms to try to express what our metrics look like, what our vulnerabilities look like, what those risk scores look like, and it doesn’t easily translate for executives. Now, by assigning monetary values to those risks, CISOs can better prioritize the challenges they’re trying to solve.
So, You’ve Quantified Your Cybersecurity Risks. What’s Next?
When an organization has identified and quantified its vulnerabilities and can say it has $20 million or $100 million or however much worth of risk, then comes the question: What to do about it?
There are generally four options:
- The organization can avoid the risk by doing nothing, but that’s a nonstarter.
- It can accept the risk and eventually parse through its risk appetite.
- It can transfer the risk to another entity, such as cyber insurance.
- It can mitigate the risk with controls.
SPARQ helps organizations decide what the right mix of options 2, 3 and 4 would be. How much risk should transfer to cyber insurance? How many dollars will the organization get back in risk reduction for what it’s spending? It’s a more focused approach to IT spending that lets leaders say, “OK, this is how much we want to transfer to insurance, and this is how much we’re going to mitigate and spend on controls.”
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