Reporting Risks to Committees and Senior Management
Presenting risk in business language
Reporting cyber risks to committees and senior management requires translating technical findings into business language that enables informed decisions, for example expressing a risk in terms of potential financial impact or expected operational disruption, instead of describing the underlying technical vulnerability with terminology the committee can't interpret. A good risk report clearly prioritizes the few risks that require an immediate decision or investment, shows the trend of aggregate risk over time and not just a snapshot, and makes explicit which risks were formally accepted and by whom, so that there's traceability of the decisions made. In practice, these reports should follow a predictable, consistent cadence, because a committee that only receives risk information sporadically loses the ability to compare its evolution over time, and because the discipline of reporting regularly forces the risk team itself to keep its analysis up to date instead of hastily rebuilding it before each presentation.