ELI5: What are Environmental Factors?
Whether you need an umbrella depends on the weather outside and whether you’re already inside. Environmental factors are the conditions — both inside and outside a company — that affect how much danger it faces.
Definition
Environmental factors in risk assessment are the internal and external conditions that influence an organization’s threat landscape and risk posture. Internal factors include staffing levels, technology complexity, organizational culture, and security maturity. External factors include regulatory changes, geopolitical instability, economic conditions, industry threat trends, and natural disaster risks. Both must be considered when identifying and prioritizing risks.
Key Details
- Internal factors: employee turnover (affects institutional knowledge and access control), legacy technology (harder to patch), security culture (affects human error rates)
- External factors: new regulations (GDPR, state privacy laws), nation-state threat actors, industry-targeted malware campaigns, natural disasters in geographic areas of operation
- Environmental factors change over time, requiring risk assessments to be updated regularly
- Geopolitical factors may affect supply chain risk (e.g., hardware manufactured in adversarial nations) and data sovereignty requirements
- Exam tip: environmental factors inform the threat landscape; they are an input to the risk identification process
Connections
- Parent: risk-assessment — environmental factors shape the context in which risks are identified and evaluated
- See also: risk-identification
- See also: geographic-considerations