How Business Impact Analysis Facilitates Effective Remediation

Roee Shohat, Head of Go to Market

March 27, 2024

5 min read

In cybersecurity, where alerts are constantly flooding in, it can be overwhelming to decide where to start. This is why asset classification and risk prioritization are key steps in the remediation lifecycle. As we’ve previously discussed, it’s a good idea to structure them around business impact.

How this approach is taken will vary significantly between industries, organization size, and security and risk management approaches. Let’s explore business impact analysis (BIA), the most common approach, with the goal of improving collaborative remediation efforts between security and engineers.

‍

What is BIA?

BIA is one of the most common methods used to understand how disruptions can affect a business's assets. Within the realm of security, it offers a systematic approach for determining which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk to critical business assets according to their potential impact and likelihood of occurrence. This helps align remediation strategies with business objectives to ensure that security efforts and resources are directed towards assets that are most critical for maintaining business continuity and achieving organizational goals.

BIA consists of questionnaires for relevant stakeholders that can either be filled out independently or carried out as interviews. We also recommend consulting with engineers who have worked on the assets under assessment, as they can shed critical technical expertise and help facilitate the most efficient implementation of risk mitigating efforts.

How Do I Build a BIA?

There are many online examples of BIA questionnaires for those who don’t wish to build their own from scratch. Before issuing them, we would still recommend approaching your organization’s leaders and anyone who works directly with the assets that will be assessed for feedback. They can provide important insight to help optimize the relevance and coverage of the questionnaires

Ultimately your goal is to obtain a ranked list of assets according to criticality. Of course, it’s only human nature for most department heads to list their assets as the most business-critical. To avoid the inaccuracies this can produce, it is helpful to provide context within the questionnaire itself around its purpose with tips for how ratings should be given. With such guidance and knowledge about the real impact their answers will have, respondents will ideally provide more reliable rankings.

If your organization already employs risk assessments, you can rejoice in half the job being taken care of. Your responsibility instead will be to identify the BIAs with the highest impact and quickly create your own ranking.

How Do I Prioritize Risks According to BIA?

Once your BIAs have been collected or sourced, it’s time to select the top 10-20% of business assets / applications to officially prioritize for remediation. We’d recommend running this list by both tech and business stakeholders, as well as the leaders they report to. Their “stamp” of approval represents important buy in for your process. Be prepared for this to take several meetings for a consensus to be reached.

After finalizing this list, it may be expedient to create or revisit how this top percentile of assets should be handled and treated in terms of remediation timelines, SLAs and control objectives. It may be necessary to make adjustments within your organization’s Vulnerability Management and Patching Policy for a more tailored approach to addressing security vulnerabilities based on newfound criticalities and exposure levels.

In the event that such adjustments aren’t possible, and specific provisions cannot be issued, it would be wise to set basic guidelines for the top percentile of critical assets. For example, if your current remediation SLA fails to account for criticality and business impact, consider adding a new section that specifically addresses this gap. Such an addition would require reducing SLAs for critical assets in order to align remediation efforts more closely with the level of risk they pose.

‍

Suggested Remediation Timelines:

Suggested Remediation Timelines For All Assets

Final Steps

All of the effort put into prioritizing assets and establishing guidelines for them can only be effective if they are properly communicated to relevant stakeholders. It is also essential to gather data on past vulnerabilities, especially around SLA compliance, in order to realistically predict future SLA progress.

Remember to temper expectations for this process–it takes time and, even once complete, for meaningful change to manifest. The best way to track your progress is by systematically collecting relevant information and representing it in an easy-to-read dashboard. It is also important to encourage different teams to continuously identify areas for improving SLAs for the triage teams to integrate into their work with engineering. Not only does this systematic approach ensure organization, but also fosters a culture of collaboration that is essential for effective, cross-organizational remediation.

See the Opus Platform in Action

Cybersecurity Consolidation: The Key to Stronger Security

February 13, 2025

SSVC Explained: How It Transforms Vulnerability Prioritization

February 5, 2025

How to Achieve and Maintain FedRAMP Compliance

February 2, 2025

Cloud-to-Code Integration: Enhancing Security from Cloud to Codebase

January 25, 2025

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): A Comprehensive Guide

January 14, 2025

Remediation as Security Immunization: Protecting Against Exploits, Malware, and Ransomware

January 25, 2025

Security Remediation Insights - Looking Back at 2024, Ahead to 2025

January 15, 2025

No-Code Automation in 2025: Choosing and Implementing Tools

January 14, 2025

Build vs. Buy: A Guide for Security Remediation Platforms

January 14, 2025

How To Design an Effective Vulnerability Management Program

January 14, 2025

Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs): A Cybersecurity Essential

November 20, 2024

NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation: Key Compliance Steps

January 14, 2025

Is Python the Right Tool for Your Cyber Security Strategy?

January 14, 2025

What Is DORA Compliance? A Practical Guide

January 14, 2025

Opus' Ownership Detection & No-Code Workflow Builder

November 5, 2024

Remediation vs. Mitigation: Key Differences Explained

November 7, 2024

What Is Vulnerability Remediation & How It Works

January 14, 2025

Vulnerability Assessment: Definitions, Methodology & Tools

November 7, 2024

Wrapping Up Season One of "30 Min on: Vulnerability Management"

October 21, 2024

CVE and CVSS: Vulnerability Assessment & Severity Ratings

October 29, 2024

CVSS Scores: How They Enhance Vulnerability Assessment

February 12, 2025

What CVE Scores Mean for Your Cybersecurity Strategy

October 29, 2024

The 2025 Guide to Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

January 12, 2025

Secure SDLC: Why and How to Integrate Security In Your Development Life Cycle

October 20, 2024

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): How It Works & Top Tools in 2025

January 12, 2025

How to Prioritize Vulnerabilities Effectively in 2025

January 12, 2025

The Opus Multi-Layer Prioritization Engine: What is it All About?

September 10, 2024

EPSS Score: Improving Vulnerability Prioritization in 2025

January 12, 2025

Opus Platform Explained: Cloud-Native Vulnerability Remediation

October 20, 2024

It’s Time to Get Proactive About Vulnerability Remediation

October 29, 2024

The Vulnerability Strikes Back - TABLETOP PART TWO

August 13, 2024

Opus Security Joins CrowdStrike Marketplace

September 29, 2024

Cloud-to-Code Integration for Comprehensive Remediation

January 15, 2025

Understanding CTEM: How Opus Security Can Help

September 22, 2024

This Is What Your Security Champions Program Is Missing

September 29, 2024

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) in a Cloud-Native World

October 7, 2024

How Business Impact Analysis Facilitates Effective Remediation

October 20, 2024

[Case Study] How Opus Solved the Puzzle of Disparate Tools and Alerts

October 7, 2024

It’s Time for Security Operations to Ditch Excel

February 13, 2025

Security Remediation Budgeting - Everything You Need to Know

October 20, 2024

How to Achieve More Effective Vulnerability Management?

August 13, 2024

Checklist: Tracking Down Key Stakeholders for Effective Security Remediation

October 2, 2024

Streamlining Security Remediation: The Convergence of CTEM and ASPM into a Single Operating Platform

September 22, 2024

How to Locate Key Stakeholders for Security Remediation

October 7, 2024

The Evolution of Vulnerability Remediation: From RBVM to Security Remediation Platforms

September 29, 2024

Practical Vulnerability Remediation - When Should You Act?

October 20, 2024

The Ultimate Remediation Lifecycle for Vulnerability Management

September 22, 2024

Global Leader in Content Solutions Streamlines Remediation with Opus

August 13, 2024

Opus Security helps Global Technology Company Connect Security Tools for More Effective Security Remediaiton

August 13, 2024

Opus Security's VP of Marketing shares her thoughts on B2B marketing in a recent DemandBase podcast.

August 13, 2024

Opus Security Wins 2023 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award

October 20, 2024

Vulnerability Management - A Story

September 22, 2024

6 Ways Orchestration Reduces Cloud Security Risk

October 2, 2024

Move Beyond Shift Left and Shift Smart

October 20, 2024

3 Tips for Bridging the Remediation Developer/Security Gap

October 2, 2024

WAF With EKS, Using Only k8s Controllers

August 13, 2024

Opus Recognized in the 2023 Gartner® Emerging Tech: Security — The Future of Cyber Is Automated Moving Target Defense report.

August 13, 2024

Wiz identifies, Opus fixes.

August 13, 2024

Writing your Cloud Opus: A Deep Dive into Orchestrating your Cloud Security

August 13, 2024

Snow in April, Alert Monsters, and Connect Four: 5 Takeaways from our SecOps Chat

August 13, 2024

Security in Sync: How Security Teams Can Make Cloud Remediation Less Painful for Engineers

October 20, 2024

Why We Need a New Approach to Remediation in the Cloud

August 13, 2024

Introducing Opus: Orchestrating Remediation and Reducing Risk in the Cloud

September 29, 2024

How Business Impact Analysis Facilitates Effective Remediation

Read next

See the Opus Platform in Action