What Is the RMF — and Who Is It For?
The risk management framework (RMF) is a set of guidelines that combines information security, risk management, and privacy management into systems development. Originally created and implemented by the Department of Defense (DOD), the framework outlines the process by which organizations can architect and engineer data security processes for IT systems.
The RMF was designed for federal agencies to more effectively comply with policies like the Privacy Act of 1974, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA), and other regulations.
In recent years, however, these guidelines — which were developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — have found a broader audience among private organizations.
Risk Management Framework Steps
The 7-step NIST RMF framework is designed to be comprehensive, flexible, repeatable, and measurable — and therefore easily adopted by any organization to manage information security and privacy risk.
The RMF steps are:
- Prepare: the organization to take initial proactive steps for properly managing security and privacy risk.
- Categorize: the systems and information processed, stored, and transmitted — and conduct an impact analysis.
- Select: the controls needed to protect the information and systems.
- Implement: the selected controls — and document all processes needed to ensure their implementation and operation.
- Assess: security controls to determine if controls are properly in place, functioning correctly, and effectively mitigating risk.
- Authorize: information systems that are working properly and reducing risk.
- Monitor: the effectiveness of security controls continuously and make adjustments as needed — as well as document any changes and enable reporting on them.
Risk Management Process
It’s important for organizations that are implementing a risk management framework to be familiar with the elements that go into the process so they can better measure performance and define what success looks like.
Risk management elements relevant to RMF implementation are:
Risk identification
Organizations need to define the parameters of the entire threat landscape and identify all possible risks to information systems. This includes threats, impact levels, and points of vulnerability for IT risk, operational risk, regulatory risk, and more.
Risk assessment
Businesses need to create a risk profile for each risk they’ve identified — and then calculate and rank those risks.
Risk mitigation
After identifying and measuring risk to information systems, risk mitigation involves determining which risks are acceptable and which need to be immediately addressed and eliminated. Organizations must also come up with mitigation strategies to handle them.
Reporting and monitoring
Regularly re-examine risks to make sure that risk mitigation strategies are effective — and document and be able to report on them.
Risk governance
All the risk management steps should be operationalized and implemented in the organization.
Benefits of RMF
Managing risk — whether it’s IT risk, regulatory risk, organization risk, legal risk, or any type of security threat an organization might encounter — is critical to running effective security and privacy programs.
- identify risk across the business
- implement a risk mitigation strategy
- evaluate risk that needs to be eliminated vs. that which is acceptable
- adapt quickly to changes in security controls or threats
- report on risk management practices
- protect sensitive and personal data
- put a risk governance system into place … and more.
The RMF approach works for new information systems, legacy systems, and for any type of organization, across industries.
How BigID Helps Companies Become Compliant
BigID helps organizations stand up and maintain their risk management framework. With a deep discovery foundation that enables organizations to identify and classify all their data — everywhere — companies can reduce risk on their sensitive, personal, and regulated data across the entire data landscape.
With BigID, classify data according to risk level — and by category, type, sensitivity, policy, and more. Additionally, identify and remediate high-risk file access issues, manage data risk throughout the data lifecycle, remediate high-risk data, implement data retention workflows, simplify data risk analysis, reduce risk on sensitive data, enable risk reporting, and incorporate a holistic approach to risk management.
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