The Difference Between a Full and Incremental Assessments

Say your company must comply with standards or you need to perform security assessments every two years so that you remain compliant. But you’re not content just doing the minimum assessment – you know risk is dynamic; threats change, equipment can break, and new employees are hired.

The questions are, is it possible to keep your risk analysis current without performing a full assessment? And how can you keep track of the remediations that were performed after the last assessment? To streamline this process, Circadian Risk introduced the Incremental Assessment Tool™ and our Project Management - Action Plan and Strategies™ (PM-APS™).

The value of an incremental security assessment

An assessment tool that allows companies to do two different things when it comes to security analysis: reassessment and validation, will increase productivity and compliance.

Incremental Assessments allow an organization to only assess what’s needed without performing a full assessment. This means the company can focus only on the things that concern them, such as new equipment, new policies, or simply reevaluating the countermeasures that were found to be deficient during the previous full assessment to ensure that the previous problems have been fixed or even new questions that did not exist in the previous assessment. This allows for a targeted reassessment to be completed quickly, without wasting time on things that are unlikely to change, like security policies.

Validation Assessments allow site managers to perform an initial self-assessment before a third party or your own internal team arrives to conduct a full assessment. If, for example, your organization has 100 sites; the assessment tool allows site managers, regardless of their level of security or compliance expertise, to conduct a baseline security and/or compliance assessment at each site in exactly the same way. This has traditionally been difficult with paper and pencil or even excel because these tools relied heavily on the knowledge and expertise of the assessor. Our Actionable Risk Analysis Tool™ and Visual Vulnerability and Inventory Assessments™ allows corporations to compare these self/baseline assessments, to see which sites have the greatest concern, and then send a professional assessor there to validate the responses before creating remediations and prioritizing tasks. This is critical for organizations with limited resources, because those resources can be prioritized to the sites that need it most.

How can you build a proactive culture of security at your company? Read more here.

A risk assessment is a living document

Traditionally risk assessments have eaten up a lot of security expert’s time, leaving them little room in their schedule to conduct remediations. By creating a digital tool, we’re allowing our clients to spend the majority of their time on remediation, not on assessments.

In the past, risk assessments were heavy paper documents, hundreds of pages long, that might have been looked at once or twice just after a risk assessment. Circadian Risk’s Incremental Assessment Tool™ allows risk analysis to be what it was always meant to be: a living document that is constantly being updated as threats change and issues are remediated.

Ready to start remediating? Contact us now for a demo.

About the Author

Daniel Young

Founder & Chief Innovation Officer

Daniel has been a security and risk advisor for more than 10 years, and is passionate about helping companies to better understand their risks to undesirable events on a daily basis. Dan previously served as the Regional Bioterrorism Coordinator for District 1 in Michigan, where he was instrumental in preparing communities for catastrophic incidents. He has also acted as the Private Security Liaison for the City of Lansing’s Critical Infrastructure Team, which identified and documented deficiencies in the city’s critical infrastructure.

He is a Co-Founder of the CSO Risk Council, a think tank of seasoned security professionals and thought leaders with extensive experience in managing the physical security and risks of large enterprises consisting of multiple sites and whose mission is to create a better process to develop and share innovative solutions and pertinent information with organizations to improve safety and security risk by providing a forum to discuss best practices and recommendations for specific risk scenarios and to network with other enterprise security professionals.