A security risk assessment is a part of an organization’s overall risk management process. The goal of the risk assessment is to identify security risks to the company’s electronic and physical assets and take appropriate actions for mitigating the identified risks to the acceptable level.
There are several terms that are used to describe the process including:
- Cybersecurity risk assessment
- Information security risk assessment
- IT security risk assessment
- Risk analysis
Although there are some academic differences among these terms, mainly related to their scope, they all have the same ultimate goal and take a similar approach. There are several different methodologies for conducting security risk assessments, with NIST 800-30 and ISO 27005 being the most popular ones.