A new survey from enterprise risk intelligence firm RiskVision Inc. and the Ponemon Institute has found that organizations are more afraid of a bad brand reputation than they are of cyberattacks.

The survey, which polled 641 people in charge of risk management activities including those at a senior management level, found that 76 percent believed that their organization lacked a comprehensive risk management strategy.

Nearly two-third of respondents named long-term damage to brand and reputation as a primary fear in terms of risk management, followed by security breaches and business disruption both at about half of respondents, and intellectual property loss polling at 31 percent.

The survey also found that 52 percent of organizations lack a formal budget for enterprise risk management with lack of resources, complexity and inability to get started cited as the main barriers holding those companies back from improving their risk management strategies.

Despite being aware of the need to implement and measure risk management strategies, nearly seven in 10 respondents said that their enterprises either don’t have metrics for determining risk intelligence effectiveness or are not sure.

“It’s encouraging that organizations are increasingly becoming more aware about the importance of risk and the growing need to understand their risk environment,” RiskVision Chief Executive Officer Joe Fantuzzi said in an email sent to SiliconANGLE. “That said, there is a big disparity between awareness and implementation of risk management practices in the enterprise.”

The fact remains, he said, that the vast majority of organizations don’t have a risk management strategy in place or a way to measure risk. “You can’t measure what you can’t see,” he said. “And in light of an increasingly regulated and sophisticated threat landscape, it will be incumbent upon organizations to truly understand the entirety of their risk environment, enabling them to prioritize and address the most critical threats before damaging their reputation beyond the ability to recover.”

Image: NY Photographic/Blue Diamond Gallery/ CC by SA 3.0