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Using a risk management framework can enhance your security and compliance posture. Keep reading to learn how.
What Is the Risk Management Framework (RMF)? Definition, Components, and Implementation Guide
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Nearly every business needs to meet some kind of compliance requirement. You might be using your compliance posture to build customer trust, or enter a heavily regulated industry like healthcare or financial services. In either case, most compliance mandates require you to understand your risk tolerance before putting controls in place to mitigate the leftover risk.
Identifying, assessing, and analyzing risk can be overwhelming for many companies. You may struggle with knowing where to start or how to set goals. A risk management framework (RMF) enables you to create repeatable processes that allow you to define, review, and mitigate IT risks to more effectively set and monitor controls.
We’re explaining the risk management frameworks worth knowing and describe the six steps that move from risk identification to board-ready reporting.
What is a Risk Management Framework?
A Risk Management Framework (RMF) is a system for defining how your organization identifies potential threats, measures their impact, and decides what to do about them. It connects risk to actual business consequences and turns abstract concerns into actionable decisions.
RMFs guide how you:
Uncover and document risks across systems, vendors, and teams.
Score those risks based on likelihood and impact.
Deploy controls to reduce exposure or transfer liability.
Monitor changes over time and report to stakeholders.
Why Should Your Organization Implement an RMF?
Without structure, you make risk decisions inconsistently, or worse, not at all. A Risk Management Framework gives your team a systematic way to surface risks early, evaluate them with context, and respond in a way that supports your business.
The value isn’t theoretical, either. An RMF helps you:
Trace risk back to specific assets, processes, and owners.
Compare risks objectively and prioritize with real data.
Apply controls consistently across systems and teams.
Document how decisions were made and why.
As your environment becomes more complex, the gaps grow with it. An RMF allows you to adapt without losing visibility and proves to customers, regulators, and your leadership that risk is being handled with discipline.
What are the Components of a Risk Management Framework?
Different frameworks use different languages (e.g., steps versus domains or principles), but most risk management models share a common backbone. No matter which one you choose, you’ll still need to govern risk, identify it, measure its impact, respond with controls, and monitor how those controls hold up over time.
Governing Risk
Everyone in your organization plays a role in mitigating risk. Governance is the practice of defining and assigning responsibilities so that everyone knows what they need to do and has the skills to do it.
Governance structures answer questions like:
Who approves the organization’s risk appetite?
Which teams own which types of risk (e.g., technical, regulatory, financial)?
How are decisions escalated, reviewed, and reported?
Essentially, governance creates a system of checks and balances. It makes sure every stakeholder knows what they’re responsible for and has the authority and resources to act on risk without hesitation or ambiguity.
Identifying Risk
Before doing anything else, you need to identify your organization’s risks and catalog them across multiple dimensions:
Strategic: Decisions that affect growth, reputation, or market position.
Operational: Risks tied to internal processes, systems, or supply chains.
Technical: Vulnerabilities in software, infrastructure, or access controls.
Regulatory: Gaps in regulatory compliance with frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO 27001.
Third-party: Exposure introduced by vendors or partners.
Some organizations take a top-down approach, starting with business goals and identifying risks that threaten them. Others work bottom-up, beginning with asset inventories or known vulnerabilities. In practice, a hybrid approach works best.
You should document risks in a way that anyone, whether it’s an auditor or a department head, can understand what’s at stake, where it lives, and what might trigger it.
Measuring Risk
After identifying risks, you need to measure their impact on your organization. At a very high level, measuring risk usually involves the following equation:
Risk = [Likelihood of an adverse event] X [Impact to the business]
While that might seem like simple math, the reality is more complex. Likelihood might depend on system exposure, past incidents, or active threats. Impact could mean anything from financial loss and reputational damage to regulatory fines or downtime.
Effective risk measurement balances subjectivity with structure, which entails:
Defining consistent scoring scales (e.g., low/medium/high or one to five).
Using predefined criteria to rate both likelihood and impact.
Mapping scores to a risk matrix to visualize priority areas.
Factoring in compensating controls that reduce exposure.
Mitigating Risk
Risk mitigation is the process of deciding how to respond to each risk and implementing the necessary controls to reduce its impact or likelihood.
Risk mitigation strategies often draw from security frameworks like NIST SP 800-53 or ISO 27001. Examples include:
Enabling MFA to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
Segregating sensitive data to limit the blast radius of a breach.
Requiring regular access reviews to catch privilege creep.
Formalizing incident response playbooks to reduce downtime.
Monitoring and Reporting Risk
Risk doesn’t stay static. With each change, you need to monitor your organization’s risk mitigation controls to ensure they maintain the accepted level of risk.
Monitoring involves both control effectiveness and risk conditions:
Are your controls still working as intended?
Has anything changed that makes a risk more or less severe?
Most risk programs rely on automation to track key indicators (e.g., control failures, access changes, security incidents, audit findings). While collecting data is one part of the process, your team also needs workflows to review it, escalate concerns, and make adjustments in real-time.
Monitoring practices include:
Running scheduled control tests or automated scans.
Reassessing risks on a quarterly or annual basis.
Linking incidents back to their originating risk categories.
Reporting trends to leadership or the board.
5 Popular Risk Management Frameworks
Not all frameworks approach risk management in the same way. Below, we look at five widely used frameworks and highlight how each approaches risk identification, prioritization, and response. Knowing where they overlap (and where they don’t) helps you choose the best foundation or mix to support your compliance goals.
NIST RMF
The NIST Risk Management Framework is a control-centric model developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help organizations secure their information systems. It's common in federal agencies and contractors, but it’s also relevant to any organization that needs structured, repeatable security practices.
The NIST RMF consists of the following seven steps:
Prepare: Establish risk context, define roles and responsibilities, and align the program with mission and business objectives.
Categorize: Identify the information types processed, stored, or transmitted by each system. Then, assign impact levels based on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Select: Choose baseline security controls from NIST SP 800-53 based on the system’s impact level. Tailor those controls to reflect organizational risk tolerance and specific operating conditions.
Implement: Deploy selected controls and document how each is applied (including technical configurations, operational processes, and physical safeguards).
Assess: Evaluate whether the controls are correctly implemented, operating as intended, and producing the desired outcome. Independent assessors often perform this step before authorization.
Authorize: A senior official reviews the system’s risk posture and grants (or denies) authorization to operate (ATO).
Monitor: Continuously track the effectiveness of controls, identify changes in the threat environment, and respond to incidents or drift.
COBIT
COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) is a risk governance-first framework developed by ISACA (previously known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association). The most recent version, COBIT 2019, defines a flexible structure that helps organizations manage risk while delivering business value through technology. It consists of these primary principles:
Principle 1: Meeting stakeholder needs
Principle 2: Covering the enterprise end-to-end
Principle 3: Applying a single integrated framework
Principle 4: Enabling a holistic approach
Principle 5: Separating governance from management
COBIT also defines 40 governance and management objectives grouped into five domains:
Evaluate, Direct, and Monitor (EDM): The governing body evaluates strategic options, directs senior management, and monitors achievement.
Align, Plan, and Organize (APO): Management addresses organization, strategy, and supporting activities.
Build, Acquire, and Implement (BAI): Management treats the definition, acquisition, and implementation of solutions, integrating them into business processes.
Deliver, Service, and Support (DSS): Management addresses services, operational delivery, and their supports, including security.
Monitor, Evaluate, and Assess (MEA): Management monitors performance and ensures that the program meets internal targets, internal control objectives, and external requirements.
OCTAVE
OCTAVE (Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation) is a methodology developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute. It places asset value, business impact, and human factors at the center of the risk conversation.
OCTAVE divides risk assessment into three phases:
Identify IT assets, how they’re used, and what threats they face. This includes interviews with business unit leaders to understand workflows, dependencies, and perceived risks.
Evaluate system configurations, network architecture, and known vulnerabilities through pen testing, user access reviews, and other assessments.
Combine insights from asset owners and infrastructure assessments to prioritize risks, assign risk response strategies, and build mitigation plans.
COSO ERM
The COSO Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework was built for leaders: board members, CFOs, CISOs, and executives who need to weigh risk, performance, and growth all at once. COSO frames risk as part of strategy, a perspective that comes to life in the COSO Cube, which maps three dimensions:
ERM components (front face): Internal environment, objective setting, event identification, risk assessment, risk response, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring.
Organizational levels (side face): Entity-level, division, business unit, and subsidiary.
Objectives (top face): Strategic, operational, reporting, and compliance.
The cube is useful because it forces multidimensional thinking, as you're evaluating how each risk plays out across the organization, which objectives it affects, and which ERM components need to engage.
For example, a new regulatory requirement may trigger a response at the business unit level (side face), impact compliance objectives (top face), and require updates to control activities, communication, and monitoring (front face).
TARA
Created by MITRE, TARA (short for Threat Assessment and Remediation Analysis) is a pragmatic framework for prioritizing cybersecurity risks based on how real-world threats intersect with your system’s specific vulnerabilities.
Two tools are central to TARA’s approach:
A catalog of attack vectors (AVs): Threats relevant to your environment and what they target, ranked by risk.
A catalog of countermeasures (CMs): Mitigation strategies ranked by cost-effectiveness.
Together, these tools support data-informed risk decisions grounded in threat modeling, remediation economics, and attacker realism.
How To Implement a Risk Management Framework in 6 Steps
Regardless of the RMF you choose, you still need to engage in the same six basic steps.
1. Set Business Objectives and Goals
Your risks primarily arise from the choices you make for your organization. Every new technology you add that enables business operations also creates a new risk. For example, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application used for collaboration also increases the number of access points that threat actors can use during an attack.
Your strategic business and compliance goals need to align so that you can make informed risk decisions.
2. Set Risk Tolerance
Not all risks deserve the same response. Some are worth accepting, while others demand immediate action. The only way to make that call is by defining your organization’s risk tolerance (how much uncertainty you’re willing to take on in pursuit of your goals).
Risk tolerance changes based on your business model, industry, and leadership appetite. For instance, a fintech startup may have a low tolerance for data integrity issues but accept higher operational risk to move fast. A healthcare company, on the other hand, might tolerate technical complexity but draw a hard line on patient data exposure.
After identifying risks and assessing their potential impact, each one needs to be evaluated through a response lens:
Accept: Benefit outweighs the impact, and mitigation is cost prohibitive.
Refuse: Impact outweighs the benefit, and mitigation is cost prohibitive.
Transfer: Benefit outweighs the impact, but you can reduce the impact by offloading some risk.
Mitigate: Benefit outweighs the impact, and you can put controls in place that reduce the likelihood of the adverse event.
For example, purchasing insurance helps you transfer some of the risk. If a cyber attack happens, then the insurance company’s payment covers the financial risk.
3. Identify, Categorize, and Catalog Assets
You can’t protect what you don’t know you have. After aligning your strategic business and compliance objectives, you need to identify and catalog all assets, including:
Data
Devices
Users
Storage locations
Applications Networks
Once identified, you need to categorize assets based on the type and level of risk they carry. Personally Identifiable Information (PII), financial records, or proprietary algorithms introduce higher confidentiality risks than public-facing content or sandbox environments. The same goes for systems supporting core operations versus non-critical tools.
Here, you’re laying the groundwork for everything that follows. Risk impact analysis, control prioritization, and monitoring all depend on knowing which assets are in scope, where they live, and how they contribute to business outcomes.
4. Do a Risk Impact Analysis
After categorizing the assets based on the risk they pose, you need to assess what would happen if those risks materialized.
This means evaluating how a disruption would affect operations, finances, legal obligations, and customer trust. A data breach, for example, might lead to regulatory fines, loss of customer confidence, incident response costs, and long-term revenue decline. Even if the likelihood of a breach is low, the impact might still demand immediate mitigation.
Consider:
Cost of downtime or service disruption
Regulatory or contractual penalties
Incident response and remediation expenses
Brand or reputational damage
Churn from affected customers or partners
The more detailed and contextual this step is, the more confidently you can prioritize risks, and defend those priorities to leadership or auditors.
5. Implement and Monitor Mitigating Controls
Often, this step is the most difficult. Your security controls can be based on either their type or purpose.
Six basic security controls you need to consider are:
Physical
Administrative
Technical
Preventive
Detective
Corrective
The first three focus on how you protect. The second three on what they’re used for. For example, you might have a technical control for managing user access to systems, networks, and applications. However, this could also be a preventive control that seeks to mitigate the risk associated with unauthorized attacker access.
The most challenging part is monitoring, enforcing, and maintaining the control’s effectiveness. Your IT environment is continuously changing. For example, your developers might spin up a container and then spin it back down later. They need to do this as part of their jobs. On the other hand, it’s often difficult to:
Identify the cloud-based resource in real-time.
Ensure appropriate configurations.
Assign a responsible party to the resource.
If you’re monitoring to ensure the controls remain in place, you can enforce them when you find something missing. For example, if you’re monitoring your environment, you can identify the new asset which allows you to review configurations and access controls. If you notice a problem, you can enforce the controls to maintain a robust security and compliance posture.
6. Report to Leadership and Board of Directors
As part of a strong compliance posture, your leadership and board of directors needs to know that your security program functions as intended. Most compliance mandates require that leadership and the board review information security so that they can understand how well the organization manages risk.
In some cases, like for SOC 2 compliance, management and boards are required to provide evidence proving that the organization complies with internal controls. If the attestation proves false, then they can be held responsible.
When reporting your compliance posture, you need to make sure that everyone understands the identified risks, the mitigating controls, and the controls’ ability to work as intended.
Level Up Your Risk Management Process With Drata
For most companies, maturing their risk management processes is challenging. Many teams start with risk registers or simple spreadsheets that document their risk and controls. However, as your organization scales, so does the complexity and cost of mismanaging risk.
Drata replaces manual tracking with automated risk management that adapts as your environment evolves. We connect your risks, controls, and frameworks in one place so you can:
Build a dynamic risk register using pre-mapped threats.
Link risks to controls across frameworks like NIST, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
Assign owners, track treatment plans, and push tasks to Jira.
Continuously monitor for changes and enforce control effectiveness.
Stronger security leads to stronger compliance. With Drata, you get both—without the overhead.
Risk Management Framework Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below, we answer common questions about risk management frameworks.
What is a Risk Management Framework?
A Risk Management Framework (RMF) is a structured system for identifying, assessing, and addressing business risks across an organization. It guides how you prioritize threats, select controls, and evaluate effectiveness over time. RMFs bring consistency to risk decisions and helps you align security efforts with business objectives and compliance requirements.
What are the Five Components of a Risk Management Framework?
Most RMFs share five core components, regardless of terminology:
Governance: Defining ownership, accountability, and oversight
Identification: Detecting risks across assets, systems, and workflows
Assessment: Measuring likelihood and impact
Mitigation: Selecting and implementing appropriate controls
Continuous monitoring: Tracking changes and validating control effectiveness
What are the 7 Elements of the NIST Risk Management Framework?
The NIST RMF outlines a seven-step process for managing risk in information systems:
Prepare: Set risk context, assign roles, and align with business objectives.
Categorize: Define system boundaries and classify data by impact level.
Select: Choose appropriate security controls based on risk and compliance needs.
Implement: Apply and document the selected controls.
Assess: Test whether controls are implemented correctly and working as intended.
Authorize: Approve the system for use based on residual risk.
Monitor: Continuously evaluate control effectiveness and adjust to change.
What is the COSO Framework?
The COSO Framework is a model for enterprise risk management that helps organizations align risk with strategy, performance, and governance. It’s built around five components:
Governance and culture
Strategy and objective-setting
Performance
Review and revision
Information, communication, and reporting
Executive teams and boards use COSO to oversee organizational risk across business functions.
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