Question

2. Resourcing profiling is the first step of the risk management life cycle. Describe what is involved with this step, what challenges are involved with resource profiling. Use examples from the real world for your analysis. Your answer must be two pages in length.

Answer 1

Before performing any risk assessment, a security risk profile must be created for the resource in question.

Resource profiling is the initial step of the seven part workflow. If a person is thinking about his or her own organisation, he or she may think of a list, containing the critical resources without applying too much effort. so the basic question that comes to mind is how to generate a list easily? The second question can be the criteria which the person will be using to distinguish the critical from noncritical without even knowing it.

In general, one may think about the resources that the organization is mostly dependent on to function properly, or the resources with most clear and sensitive data, or may be the resources mostly available to the people. The main idea is to divide the whole process into levels of importance to organization. Any criteria can be applied for the same and use the information to prioritize any subsequent assessment work.

Creating categories of resources is an important  task. The categories can be according to the level of importance to the organization. It may also help in deciding the efforts required if the security is breached.

The only way of effectively working through the list is by attacking the problem using proper methods and strategically. whenever starting a program, just focus on small number of individuals that are most important to the organization and focusing the risk assessment efforts there.

The objective must be clear while dealing with the resources, when the findings will be addressed and by what means. There may be external pressure from customers, auditors, regulators, and so on to shift the assessment focus to other areas, but one must be firm with his decisions.

The main challenge is to satisfy the customer's need. If the customer is not satisfied then whole process will be at risk. Secondly there will be challenges at each step or phase for successful completion ans according to the time limit specified or discussed at the beginning. another challenge is the cost of task switching as well as the cost of being late on project.

The key requirement in developing resource profiles is to understand which variables impact the resource demand across projects.

An example can be the impact of the productivity index in changing the portfolio ranking of projects based on the return of investment rather then net sales or margin.