Wipro partners WEF for quantifying cyber risk

The software firm and WEF partner companies have been working together to evangelise the need for organisations to develop cyber resilience and the importance of quantifying cyber risk

Country's third largest software services firm Wipro has partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to develop a cyber value-at-risk (VAR) framework that will allow organisations to assess threat landscape, the nature of assets needed protection and quality of defenses.

As per the Forum's estimates, if the sophistication of attacks keeps ahead of defensive capabilities, the resultant new cyber regulations and restrictive policies could hurt innovation by about $3 trillion by 2020.

Consequently, business leaders and policy makers have highlighted the need for a framework that would aid them in making better cyber security decisions, Wipro said in a statement.

"The cyber VAR concept suggests that organisations actively consider aspects like value of their assets, profile of attackers and the existing security posture, as they build their cyber risk models," WEF Partnering for Cyber Resilience Manager (IT Industry) Elena Kvochko said.

Wipro and the WEF partner companies have been working together to evangelise the need for organisations to develop cyber resilience and the importance of quantifying cyber risk, it added.

"While the Cyber VAR framework can be applied across all industries, this has specific relevance to sectors that involve sensitive personal data such as financial services, healthcare and retail and those involving critical national infrastructure, including the transportation and energy sectors," it said.

Through the framework, an organization can reliably determine and predict the VAR threshold of their cyber exposure.

This allows them to determine whether it makes more business sense for them to transfer the risk to an insurance company, take remedial actions to reduce this VAR, or manage the exposure as part of standard business risks.

"Through this framework, we have been able to help our customers quantify their threats, prioritize business assets and assist them in directing their investments towards better risk mitigation," Wipro Head Corporate Business Development R Guha said.