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CRQ enables organizations to make smart cybersecurity investments.

Proper evaluation, measurement, and valuation of risk and its business impact is the foundation for ensuring an organization’s security, trust, and resilience. Executives must translate cybersecurity risk to business terms so that executive leaders can prioritize cyber investments appropriately.ⁱ

ⁱRichmond

When implemented correctly, CRQ programs help organizations accomplish this goal by addressing the entire picture, as opposed to a piecemeal approach to managing risk. According to Banga, “CRQ is when you take a much more rigorous approach to look at all of the factors that go into your effective risk. In this particular case, you have to look at both the cyber breach likelihood as well as the impact and use a fairly rigorous method – that is mostly quantitative – to come up with a pretty good estimate (or not so good estimate) of your cyber risk in monetary units.”

Gibbler echoes this position by recommending that, like other business initiatives, “security leaders need to provide cyber risk quantification insights in financial terms — ultimately helping non-technical stakeholders understand how cyber risk translates into business risk.”

CRQ can be used in tandem with other compliance frameworks (e.g., ISO 27002, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, etc.), but it still changes the approach to risk-based cybersecurity:

CRQ programs drive decision-makers to allocate resources and prioritize remediation efforts by demonstrating how much money the business stands to lose if a given security gap is not addressed.

By quantifying cyber risk financially, CISOs can analyze cyber risk in the same way the organization looks at all other types of risk: in terms of its impact on financial targets. This process puts the intangible nature of cyber risk into tangible business context — helping stakeholders understand the organization’s potential financial exposure due to various risk factors and impact scenarios.”