Helping executive leadership understand risk

You can come up with all the safeguards and write all the security policies in the world, but if you don’t have buy-in from your leadership team, your organization is still at risk. Effectively communicating risk to the decision makers in your organization is key to getting the resources you need for a secure infrastructure.

Andrew Plato, founder of Anitian understands the frustrations that arise from a breakdown in communication. It is, in part, what led him to start his company. Plato has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, and in that time he has learned what it takes to break through and get executive leadership to understand complex security issues.

The challenges of communicating risk

As risk management practitioners, you are immersed in a world that is filled with complex and nuanced language, philosophies and theories that the average executive leadership team may not understand. However complex it may be, leadership needs to understand risk management to make informed decisions for the organization. Communicating these risks comes with a number of challenges that Plato breaks down:

• It’s difficult to assign value to IT assets.
• Risk and security language is incomprehensible to leadership.
• Numbers can be deceptive; most data points are educated guesses.
• Risk data has a short shelf life.

Despite the challenges, these communication barriers can be broken down, and it’s up to you to make sure your leadership team understands risks.

Overcoming the challenges of communicating risk

Andrew Plato will explore these challenges during our next WebTracks series webinar on January 14—all about communicating risk to executive leadership. In this webinar, he will cover strategies for improving communication more effectively including:

• The value of business risk intelligence
• How to execute a rapid risk assessment
• Making risk assessments a leadership tool
• Why current risk analysis methods are flawed
• The benefits of simplified, business-centric risk assessments
• Strategy for documenting risks in a clear, concise and actionable method
• Decision making based on risk

Register for this free WebTracks series webinar today and learn how to better communicate risk to your executive leadership.

For an added webinar experience, be sure to tweet along with us using #WebTracks or search for #WebTracks on Twitter for some of the conversation tweeted during the event if you can’t make the webinar in real time.