Reporting on risk can be a tricky task for a variety of reasons. It is not uncommon for risk scores to come from subjective and manual scoring methods which makes it difficult to gain insight and prioritize the risks for the organization. Having a way to calculate your risk in a repeatable way can scale your integrated risk management efforts across the business. Utilizing a risk formula and a standard method of aggregation can help to paint a clearer picture of risk across the organization.

Read the blog: Risk Management Tools: Discover and Quantify Risk for Your Business

Calculate and Standardize to Report on Risk

Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these risk reporting woes! The first way to get risk reporting insight is by creating a common risk scoring language and standardizing the scores through a risk calculation. A risk score calculation will standardize risk metrics by calculating the inputs of risk assessments and other data points coming in from risk-adjacent systems, such as vulnerability scanners or threat detection systems. Additionally, a risk calculation can take into account your control tests. For example, if a control is tested and considered ineffective, that value can be weighed against your risk score, and automatically increase your current residual risk based on the control deficiency for the related risk. As your risk management program matures, you can continue to include new data points to enrich risk scoring and insights gained from reporting. Once you have a common risk calculation defined, you can start to compare and prioritize the risks across your organization.

Aggregate and Prioritize to Report on Risk

The second way to get the most out of your business’ risk reporting is with a standardized risk aggregation method. A standard method of aggregation will give you a consistent way to compare risk scores between business units, processes, and assets while reporting on risk. Once you have your risk aggregation in order, you can start looking across the entire organization’s risks and prioritize where time and resources should be focused.

Calculating risk scores start to remove the subjectivity from individuals assigning risk scores. Additionally, aggregation of those scores starts to paint a much clearer picture of where time and resources should be spent by your organization. This can be the key to unlocking the risk insight that you are looking for when reporting on risk.

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