What risks pose the gravest threat to your business? Is your physical building structurally sound? Are access controls in place and observed? Are fire safety measures appropriate? IBM’s risk and vulnerability assessment helps you answer these questions, and it also recommends cost-effective safeguards to mitigate and prevent those risks. The risk readiness assessment can identify a single point of failure by asset category.

Helps you understand what risks pose the gravest threat to your business assets

Recommends cost-effective safeguards to mitigate and prevent risks

The discipline of risk management is hardly new, but the threats that confront your business are constantly changing and increasing in complexity. Our consultants are skilled at adapting risk management methodologies to meet the specific needs of your business and protect the continuity of your business assets. Our assessments help you pinpoint where your business is most vulnerable, identify potential impacts and evaluate safeguards.

Not all disruptions can be prevented, but our consultants can apply time-tested methodologies for accepting, reducing or transferring risk. The ultimate goal of is to help you take immediate actions that shield your business from risks that can disrupt your operations.

The risk and vulnerability assessment helps identify and evaluate operational risks, with an emphasis on physical and logical IT assets. The assessment may include a review of your facilities, the business and IT disciplines currently in use, and the security of logical and physical elements. This assessment provides a better understanding of the exposures that pose the greatest risks to the interruption of your business, so that appropriate mitigation techniques can be prioritized and implemented.

The IBM risk and vulnerability assessment is tailored to meet each client’s specific needs. The assessment includes the following review elements:

• Physical: review of electrical, mechanical, and structural elements of the facility
• Logical: review of business and IT disciplines that are used to manage the business
• Security: review of logical security of your data and information, as well as the physical security of the site
• Workplace Safety: review of personnel protection considerations such as mail room package handling, termination and hiring policies and procedures, emergency supplies, training, and trauma management

Included is a review that relates the assets of the organization to the threats that could negatively impact business continuity and information availability. The deliverable is a presentation to help prioritize and, if desired, present a business case to substantiate risk mitigation techniques and safeguards. Depending on the level of analysis desired, recommendations and cost-benefit analyses may be included to assist in making educated, risk mitigation decisions.

• Identify events or threats that could impact continuity of business operations, brand image or reputation, and the probability of occurrence
• Establish go-forward plans to mitigate risk
• Perform a detailed threat analysis or establish go-forward plans to mitigate risk
• Determine how new business initiatives or new technology will impact the enterprise
• Review Homeland Security exposures
• Determine ROI on safeguards
• Identify regulatory compliance exposures such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

IBM risk and vulnerability assessment helps you identify business assets that are at the highest risk, establish objective value, assess potential vulnerabilities and impacts, and propose safeguards and mitigation tactics. Your business will benefit from:

• Prioritize and set risk thresholds for your critical business processes and resources
• Evaluate risk management tactics and costs associated with different levels of protection
• Broaden your focus from mitigating risk to proactively prevent failures
• Demonstrate due diligence in risk management
• Establish audit readiness for regulatory and industry watchdog agencies
• Make informed decisions on how best to protect your business

IBM’s risk and vulnerability assessment helps you gain a better understanding of exposures related to physical and logical IT assets that can cause a business interruption or degradation in service, including the identification of internal exposures and self-induced threats. The assessment helps prioritizes and set standardized risk thresholds for your critical business processes and resources, and evaluate risk management tactics and costs associated with different levels of protection. This enables you to broaden your focus from mitigating risk to proactively preventing loss of business or information assets.