Business Development | Vulnerability

Can You Do One Risk Assessment for Multiple Security Standards?

April 5, 2019 | 3 min read
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It isn’t news that a warehouse has a different level of risk than a headquarters facility with key assets, including people. But often, different departments in the same building can have different levels of risk. As a result, varying departments within a single facility can have their own physical security standards. In one risk assessment, you can be switching between any number of standards as you go from one department to another.

How do you do an effective gap analysis of those varying security standards?

If you’re using traditional risk assessment tools, you can’t assess compliance to multiple security standards—not in a cost-effective way. You could do a separate assessment of every single department, but let’s be realistic—that’s just not going to happen.

Yet, if you’re subject to multiple security standards, you’re required to prove compliance with each one of them. So what do you do?

Challenges of Departmental Risk Assessments

If you’re assessing risk in departments with different standards, you have several obstacles getting in your way. You’ll need to clear each one of them in order to effectively conduct gap analyses for multiple standards.

First, you need to know what standards your departments are subject to, and what departments aren’t subject to any standards. You could even run into some departments that need to comply with more than one standard.

Each security standard has its own set of requirements. Some will apply to your risk assessment, and others won’t. You’ll need to know which items you’re responsible for, and what they mean.

Second, you’ll need to keep track of every question you need to ask. Some standards have hundreds of questions, so that’s a lot of organization and management on your plate. You won’t be able to rely on a legal pad of questions for that. Instead, you need something dynamic that allows you to:

  • Switch back and forth
  • Work with multiple standards in one assessment
  • Filter relevant questions
  • Be guided step-by-step through several gap analyses simultaneously

The right technology associates the relevant questions with each department, so that you only see the right questions at the right time.

Third, you need a way to produce a cogent report at the department level. Your report should be flexible enough so that you can review data by facility, by floor, by department and by each security standard. If your organization has multiple buildings, you need to be able to aggregate your data across facilities as well.

Easy Department Level Risk Assessments

If you’re using traditional risk assessment methods, how will you effectively assess multiple department standards at once? It’s very complex, and adding any layer of nuance is extremely challenging. It’s especially complicated if you have related departments, such as R&D, shipping and receiving, departments with classified information, and Information Technology, at more than one facility. You could have 130 research departments in 250 buildings, on different floors in different parts of each building. How do you sort and filter all that data across multiple facilities?

Circadian Risk handles the task with ease. Security consultants who use Circadian Risk assessment software have a powerful, flexible tool that makes it simple to do risk assessments at the department level.

Simply incorporate one or more standards into the application and assign them to specific departments. As you move from department to department, Circadian Risk software adapts to the changing standards across departments. It automatically prompts you with the proper question set, and ensures that you inspect according to the standard.

Easy Reporting at a Glance

Circadian Risk’s interactive dashboard provides clear reporting at the department level. You can easily view data by building, floor, department or security standard. You can even aggregate data across facilities and filter it any way you like.

Circadian Risk’s visualized data makes it immediately clear where your gaps lie in your security standards, and the software automatically provides corrective actions so you can quickly resolve those gaps.

If your facilities have departments with their own security standards, Circadian Risk is the only tool that makes gap analysis and reporting as simple as flipping a switch. See it for yourself—schedule a live demo today.

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