Cyber Risk

Every business relies heavily on technology to execute its most critical business processes and generate value for its customers. This digital dependency cuts across all critical infrastructure industries—and the same holds true in the public sector, where agencies rely on technology for mission success. Each day, however, the attack surface that hackers can exploit expands as the world grows more interconnected. These trends are creating countless opportunities for advanced adversaries to steal proprietary information, manipulate data, and disrupt critical operations. Business and government leaders know cyber threats are more dangerous than ever, and yet their enterprises still make the mistake of treating cybersecurity like an information technology problem.

All too often, cybersecurity strategies are not grounded in business or mission risk. Instead, they are based on security control best practices and the acquisition of costly, duplicative security tools. This approach to cybersecurity fails to counter advanced cyber threats and wastes finite resources. Further, this approach makes it harder for cybersecurity leaders to demonstrate value within their organization and to devise defensible investment strategies.

Equally protecting all your organization’s operational and technology assets is not a practical option in today’s connected environment: Some assets are so critical they must be protected with a risk-based defense strategy. Allocating resources in response to a cyber incident or an audit vulnerability finding may solve short-term challenges; however, taking a reactive approach to cyber risk management is costly and ineffective in the long term. Business and government cybersecurity leaders must shift to a proactive mindset and come to a shared understanding of the relationship between critical assets and costs.

In addition, leaders need defensible, data-driven analysis to provide assurance that their cybersecurity and risk management programs are protecting their most critical assets, accepting risk within the organization’s appetite to enable objectives, and delivering value for the whole enterprise. If cybersecurity outcomes start falling short of business and mission needs, leaders must be able to quickly identify shortcomings, refocus priorities, and reallocate security spending with confidence.

To overcome these challenges, Booz Allen has developed cyber risk solutions for corporate boards, C-suite executives, chief information security officers, and senior government officials.

Our solutions enable organizations to prioritize and protect what matters most. The benefits of this approach are clear:

• Enhanced Cyber Resilience.  Approaching cybersecurity and risk management within the context of an ecosystem and applying a threat-centric approach protects a client’s business value chain and mission while also improving compliance posture.
• Enhanced Decision Making. Boards of directors, executives, and management make decisions daily that affect or are affected by the cyber risk posture of an organization. Risk-based decision making helps leaders achieve strategic goals by first evaluating related cyber risks and determining whether their impact falls acceptably within the organization’s risk appetite. 
• Optimized Current and Future Cyber Spending. Analytical, data-driven risk models, cyber threat intelligence, advanced tooling, and threat modeling are used to both qualitatively and quantitatively measure the risk of loss events (risk scenarios) and the impact of security investments.   
• Cross-Organizational Collaboration. As business units understand the risk impact that they have on the rest of the organization, and vice versa, leaders at all levels are better able to operate business processes more efficiently and effectively.
• Proactive Approach. Fit-for-purpose cyber metrics programs provide strategic, operational, and tactical insights for key decision makers (C-suite through cyber operators) before a potentially negative event occurs using telemetry data, predictive analytics, and technology-enabled solutions, thereby enabling the business to stay focused on its primary objectives.

Our solutions address cyber risk as a business and mission imperative. We leverage the vast experience of our 5,000+ cyber-focused professionals to solve our clients’ most complex challenges. We bring an adversarial, assume-breach mindset from experience handling major cyber attacks like NotPetya and WannaCry. We understand how adversaries attack organizations, what security controls are the most important, and how to design the most effective cybersecurity strategies that enable our clients’ business or mission priorities.

Booz Allen can help your organization elevate its cyber resiliency and cyber defense capabilities with our cyber risk solutions. Our next-generation solutions and highly skilled professionals will help you manage the challenges of today and tomorrow with confidence.