Risk Tolerance: Understanding the Risks to your Organization

‘A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for,’ said Dr. Grace Hopper, Rear Admiral of the US Navy and a computer pioneer. As soon as the ship leaves the harbor, or even the dock, there are risks. Depending on conditions and purposes, the ship’s crew might decide they are negligible, that they can be recovered from, or that the potential rewards are worth the risk. The same ideas can be applied to computers. A computer that is not networked to anything and never turned on is likely safe from most cybersecurity attacks but is also not particularly useful. Deciding what risks…