Risk management is critical, but knowing how to assess and remedy risks adequately can be time-consuming and sometimes difficult, especially with the traditional tools that have required a manual and labor-intensive approach. For industries that harbor sensitive customer or client data, including healthcare to financial to legal and more, the need for an automated risk assessment process is pressing. That’s where BALLAST comes to the rescue.
With BALLAST, companies of all industries and sizes can quickly evaluate and manage security risks for one or hundreds of locations. BALLAST improves the risk assessment process, moving IT professionals efficiently through the assessment phase to tracking remediation and managing risks.
3 Problems with Manual Risk Assessments
Not only is the manual, spreadsheet-style version of risk assessments frustrating and time-consuming, it can also be expensive. Specifically, these three problems are common with the manual risk assessment process.
- An Unreproducible Approach—Since the manual risk assessment process can’t be reproduced, the certainty of its results are questionable.
- Failure to Identify Greatest Risks—If you are trying to track risks across multiple business units, spotting troublesome trends and commonalities can be difficult if not impossible when using multiple spreadsheets.
- Incomplete Risk Identification—Version control with spreadsheets is also a pain. As a result, it’s often easier to just send out last year’s assessment and hope for the best. As a result, your risk assessments are probably not keeping up with the latest threats.
3 Ways Automated Risk Assessments Can Help
Unlike using spreadsheets, having all risk assessment data in one central repository allows tremendous flexibility in the development and presentation of reports. Here are three specific ways BALLAST’s automated tool can offer risk assessment solutions at your fingertips.
- Intuitive Reporting Dashboard—Reporting through the BALLAST automated risk assessment tool can be configured to support simple, single entity dashboards or more robust views for organizations with multiple or many operating units. Detailed metrics can be provided to an individual facility or operating unit level, and businesses can view the risk levels by location and even show business units how they stack up against peers.
- Automated Remediation Tracking—With BALLAST’s automated remediation tracking, remediation items can be prioritized, and responsibility can be delegated and tracked. Users at the facility level can see the assessment scope and progress of all remediation activity, and deadlines, detailed work steps, and instructions can be entered by task.
- One-Click Compliance Reporting—Among its greatest features, BALLAST’s automated risk assessment tool offers IT professionals one-click compliance reporting, which provides a fully-formulated, up-to-date risk assessment report in seconds.
Are you tired of using spreadsheets to manage security risks? See what BALLAST can do for you. Schedule a demo today to learn more!
