Operational risk, arising from challenges with internal processes, systems, or personnel, is a reality every organization must confront. While it may not always be possible to eliminate these risks entirely, leaders can adopt proactive measures to minimize their occurrence and implement strategies to mitigate potential impacts if they do arise.
It is imperative that leaders proactively plan for operational risk, as without proper attention it can negatively impact all aspects of an organization including financial performance and brand reputation.
There are a few key ways in which leaders can help manage operational risk, and one core activity is conducting operational risk assessments. Operational risk assessments play a critical role in identifying, quantifying, and mitigating risks before they escalate into disruptive events. If security teams are diligent in their operational risk assessments, they will be able to help leaders maintain business continuity, ensure resilience in the face of disruption, and make more informed decisions.
Building a Strong Foundation: Key Consideration for Operational Risk Assessments
Incorporating mitigation strategies into strategic plans is essential for managing operational risk. While leaders may assume their processes and employees are fail-safe, specific plans must address potential failures and establish responses if risks materialize. Since systems can break and errors occur, operational risk assessments should involve managers and employees across all departments and locations to ensure alignment and preparedness.
To best prepare against operational risk, security teams need to undergo operational risk assessments, which includes:
- Identifying risks
- Assessing the impact of these risks
- Evaluating existing controls current in place
- Proposing new strategies to complement, amplify, or amend to existing mitigation plans
At the start of the risk assessment process, leaders should ask themselves the following questions:
- What are the potential operational risks facing our organization?
- What is the likelihood and potential impact of each risk?
- What controls are currently in place to mitigate these risks?
- What additional mitigation strategies are needed?
After addressing these questions, the team should use the insights to build a clear understanding of the risk landscape, involving key stakeholders across operations, IT, HR, finance, legal, and more. Aligning decision-makers ensures the risk assessment process captures potential impacts across all functions and teams. Cross-functional collaboration is vital to gathering diverse perspectives, avoiding human error, and finding overlooked threats.
Beyond the Checklist: Essential Best Practices
Using reliable data sources such as incident reports, industry benchmarks, and historical trends will provide a solid foundation for identifying and assessing risks. It should be remembered that when it comes to operational risk and its assessment, there is a need for both qualitative and quantitative data in order to get a holistic view of potential risks. For example, employee risk can’t always be captured in data, and anecdotal evidence is often very helpful.
The following four steps are useful to most operational risk assessment processes:
Step One: Scenario Planning & Wargaming
There is great value in conducting scenario planning and wargaming exercises to simulate different risk scenarios. These exercises can reveal vulnerabilities in current risk management practices and help assess the effectiveness of existing controls. This will illuminate the holes in current strategies and often bring to light risks that had been previously falling under the radar.
Step Two: Regular Review and Continuous Improvement
Security teams will want to advocate for regular risk assessments (annually or quarterly) to ensure the risk landscape is continuously evaluated and updated. After all, risk is not permanent. It is ever-changing and evolving. A new process or employee may introduce a new risk and regular assessments will help to ensure that new risks are identified before they escalate into disruptive events.
Step Three: Integration with Threat Intelligence
Organizations will realize significant benefits if they integrate threat intelligence into operational risk assessments. Threat intelligence can provide real-time insights into emerging risks, enabling a more proactive and agile approach to risk management.
Step Four: Partner with Experts to Extend Internal Bandwidth
It is not uncommon for an organization’s security team to be stretched for time and resources. They are tasked with navigating a vast and complex landscape of security risks, including operational risk, but with limited resources at their disposal. These teams will typically look for outside vendors to partner with to immediately expand their bandwidth and capabilities. Seerist is an example of a company that can help with security intelligence and offer assistance in the continuous monitoring of global risks.
Leveraging the expertise of a third-party vendor typically allows internal teams to spend more time providing thoughtful analysis versus manual data collection and analysis. For example, the Seerist platform leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help organizations avoid becoming stuck in the weeds at every step of their risk assessment process.
Leveraging Technology for a More Effective Approach
Traditional methods of operational risk assessment and management use manual data collection, static risk analysis, and one-time assessments. These tactics may offer some valuable insights at first glance, but they are extremely insufficient at providing ongoing intelligence. Alternatively, organizations need to be committed to continuous, ongoing assessment and management in order to keep pace with dynamic, real-time and ever-evolving global and geopolitical threats.
Fortunately there are many ways to revolutionize operational risk assessments today. The technology offerings are fast, smart, and can save internal teams hours and hours of time. Specific ways in which technologies, such as the ones leveraged by Seerist, benefit organizations in their operational risk assessment journeys include:
- AI-Powered Data Analysis: AI can process vast amounts of data in real-time to uncover hidden risks, identify patterns, and provide more accurate predictions. The speed in which AI can deliver information is at rates that no human, or team of humans, is capable of – making this an invaluable innovation. Technology can quickly parse through massive quantities of data using keywords, locations, event types, and date filters, getting location-specific events and expert analysis to better interpret information and act upon it. Seerist ensures that technologies are carefully monitored by intelligence and data experts. The experts lend context to data and verify and validate the technology’s findings.
- Automation of Repetitive Tasks: Automation frees up human resources to focus on strategic decision-making and in-depth analysis, improving efficiency and speed in risk assessments. When internal teams aren’t scouring open source data for events and activities that may impact their organization, they can spend more time discussing and developing the strategies that keep people, operations, assets, and reputations out of harm’s way.
- Real-Time Risk Monitoring: Continuous risk monitoring has undisputed benefits, including early warnings and ongoing visibility into key risk indicators. With the amount of data available today, it is truly negligent for an organization to be unaware of disruptive events. To help make the process of monitoring risks easier and more efficient, Seerist offers an intuitive map-based interface, charts, visual graphics, and dashboards to simplify the exploration, discovery, and assessment of trends and risks.
Third-party experts such as Seerist are leveraging all of these technological advancements – AI, automation, and real-time monitoring – to offer comprehensive, real-time operational risk management program.
Seerist: Empowering Organizations with Effective Operational Risk Management Initiatives
An advanced, fully featured risk management solution will serve as the command center for an organization’s security operations, providing continuous, 360-degree visibility and situational awareness. By automatically aggregating and analyzing intelligence from myriad global sources, applying powerful AI and ML with expert human analysis, these platforms empower security teams to anticipate emerging threats, make data-driven decisions, and proactively prevent incidents before they can impact the organization.
With features like customizable alerting, granular data filtering, collaborative workflow tools, and an intuitive user experience, the best risk management software will seamlessly integrate into your existing security infrastructure and empower your entire SOC to operate at peak efficiency and effectiveness.
Seerist’s augmented analytics and risk management solution can be a massive asset in your operational risk management process. By fusing technology with insight from expert analysts, Seerist is able to not only ensure that breaking event information is delivered to platform users quickly, but they also provide insights and contextual analysis from on-the-ground experts. This combination of humans and machines is a very powerful and unique differentiator and organizations that partner with Seerist will realize many benefits including:
- Real-Time Data Analysis: Continuous data processing and analysis empowers real-time risk identification. Seerist allows security teams to have a solid understanding of events occurring around the globe. Manual monitoring of this amount of information would take hours, if not weeks. Seerist can do it in mere minutes.
- Actionable Insights: With technology-driven data sorting and analysis, security teams have the intelligence they need to help guide leaders in making the most informed, strategic decisions possible.
Leveraging Seerist, security teams can reduce time spent searching for potential threats and instead spend time developing strategic action plans. - Proactive Mitigation: Organizations are able to identify and manage risk before they escalate into major disruptions. This is done by having a solid understanding of current events, as well historic activities. Seerist is able to leverage historic data, which often illuminates previously undetected trends and patterns that point to potential future issues. Seerist makes it possible to not just react to situations happening, but to preempt major disasters – staying one step ahead is a massive competitive advantage.
The Seerist team has been reimagining and building upon the classic intelligence process for almost a decade. By developing innovative approaches that fuse AI capabilities with human expertise, Seerist has created technology to enable a dynamic, interdependent intelligence process. This approach promises to enhance the agility, accuracy, and overall effectiveness of intelligence and security operations, setting a new standard for the future of analysis.
The future of the risk management and the risk intelligence cycle holds immense potential as security experts increasingly combine AI with human analysis. By leveraging AI to handle massive data sets and automating routine tasks, and pairing it with human expertise to provide context and critical analysis, it is possible to develop a more agile, responsive, and accurate intelligence process. This shift towards a more dynamic, interdependent intelligence process is illustrated below, which highlights the integration of AI-driven human-validated intelligence.
Building a Future of Operational Resilience
Every organization and business operating today faces potential risks, including operational risk. While it is impossible to remove all threats, it is possible to become more proactive in your operational risk management strategy.
Risk management frameworks are pivotal in shaping an organization’s approach to risk. Best practices should be discussed and all challenges should be viewed as opportunities to improve strategic decision-making. Risk management isn’t something on the checklist, but it is something that must be part of an organization’s culture. By accessing the current state of your organization, leaders will be able to pinpoint where the weaknesses currently exist, as well as establish a culture in which operational risk is acknowledged and collectively avoided.
Internal teams that are overtasked and understaffed may want to leverage the expertise of outside vendors. Seerist is one such option – delivering a robust risk and threat intelligence solution that empowers leaders to make confident and smart decisions.
Providing high quality, in-depth analysis coupled with the speed and scale of AI, Seerist provides comprehensive, contextualized, and actionable intelligence. With offers such as advanced analytics, AI, and real-time alerts, Seerist offers a plethora of tools to make successful risk management more attainable. Organizations need to rely upon intelligent, proactive risk management tools in order to stay ahead of uncertainty. Are you ready? If not, consider trying a demo of Seerist. It’s always a good time to focus on risk management and Seerist is ready to support you.
