I don’t know how many times I’ve heard cybersecurity professionals say something like, “Not having multi-factor authentication is a huge risk for our organization.” The truth is, that type of statement may illustrate a control weakness, but unless the unwanted outcome is a ding in an audit report where MFA is required, that is not the real risk. The real risk is the probability of a ransomware incident, for example, or the leak of personally identifiable information (PII) from a customer database.
For enterprises, risk lay in the potential losses associated with unwanted outcomes incurred through their computing environments. (The cybersecurity piece of this typically focuses on incidents where these outcomes were caused by an intelligent adversary.) A simple way to think about unwanted outcomes is to consider the ways we might fail to meet one or more of our control objectives – confidentiality, integrity, availability, or other objectives – and experience one of the aforementioned incidents, among others.
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