Enterprises fear brand damage more than data breaches

The biggest fear for organizations is long-term damage to brand and reputation, yet despite this three quarters lack a comprehensive risk management strategy.

This is one of the findings of a survey for risk intelligence company RiskVision carried out by the Ponemon Institute, it reveals that 63 percent of organizations are worried about reputation and brand damage. This is followed by security breaches (51 percent), business disruption (51 percent) and intellectual property loss (37 percent).

But despite these fears 76 percent say they either don't have a clearly defined risk management strategy in place or the one they do have isn’t applicable to the entire enterprise. In addition, only 14 percent of respondents believe that their organization's risk management processes are truly effective. A worrying 52 percent say they lack a formal budget for enterprise risk management.

The top barriers to reaching risk management goals are seen as, lack of resources (44 percent), complexity (44 percent) and an inability to get started (43 percent). Also 69 percent of enterprises either don’t have metrics for determining risk intelligence effectiveness or are not sure if they do.

"It's encouraging that organizations are increasingly becoming more aware about the importance of risk and the growing need to understand their risk environment," says Joe Fantuzzi, CEO of RiskVision. "That said, there is a big disparity between awareness and implementation of risk management practices in the enterprise. The vast majority of organizations don't have a risk management strategy in place, while more than two thirds don't rate assets based on criticality or don't have metrics for determining risk intelligence effectiveness. You can’t measure what you can't see. And in light of an increasingly regulated and sophisticated threat landscape, it will be incumbent upon organizations to truly understand the entirety of their risk environment, enabling them to prioritize and address the most critical threats before damaging their reputation beyond the ability to recover."

The full report is available to download from the RiskVision website.

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