Enterprise Risk Assessment and Security Compliance Framework

Enterprise Risk Assessment

The principal risk associated with the Data Security Coordinator and his or her role in the security plan lies in properly training employees and selecting the appropriate service providers. Additionally, it is necessary to continually monitor and evaluate the progress of service providers to ensure that they remain compliant with both enterprise and industry standards. The Data Security Coordinator serves as the central hub for managing these responsibilities, overseeing controls that span employee onboarding, system infrastructure, and data governance. This assessment framework identifies risks across three primary domains: internal employee-access risks, external infrastructure risks, and data protection risks. Each domain requires distinct controls, monitoring procedures, and compliance measures.

Internally, several foundational controls must be established. It is necessary to ensure that there is a set period of no more than one month for which passwords must be changed across all user accounts. Personal information should be accessible only to the Data Security Coordinator and to C-level employees, ensuring that sensitive data remains confined to those with legitimate need-to-know. An orderly, formal procedure must take place for de-provisioning terminated employees, in which they provide access to all of their data and have all of their employee access denied promptly. These controls mitigate the risk of unauthorized access, credential compromise, and data leakage following employee departure.

Internal Risk Controls

Risk assessment for external risks includes evaluating and monitoring the progress of the service provider responsible for provisioning the company's firewall. Additionally, depending on the efficacy of encryption methods, data masking may be needed to augment the encryption method. User authentication is a critical point of risk that can ideally be solved with a two-pronged authentication method, such as that provided by Google's Authentication platform (Harper, 2014). This dual-factor approach significantly reduces the likelihood of unauthorized access even if a single credential is compromised. Service provider oversight ensures that external security infrastructure remains current and effective against evolving threats.

External Risk Controls

Data protection risks include utilizing the most effective method of replication for the purpose of backups. Cloud-based solutions are widely recommended for backup and disaster recovery, providing redundancy and geographic distribution of critical data (Harper, 2014). Regular backup validation and recovery testing are essential to ensure that data can be restored in the event of system failure or compromise.

Audit Procedures

To audit external risks, the auditors will need to verify that relevant data has been encrypted or masked, which will require access to the encryption keys used for these methods. Access control measures and authentication profiles—the latter of which should utilize a dual identification approach—can be audited by testing their accessibility with both correct and incorrect credentials. External threats can be audited by testing the validity of the security platform in use, while data protection and backups can be audited by performing updates and maintenance to determine if data has been stored correctly and is readily accessible for recovery.