Seasoned security professionals who want to understand the full spectrum of risk facing their most valued assets know to start by conducting an assessment.
These go by various names, including safety assessment and security audit, but in the security director’s mind the end goal is the same: first help me to identify all potential threats and hazards facing my personnel, facilities and systems, and then to gauge my vulnerability to the most likely threats as well as the consequences were each threat to became a reality.
Haystax users deploy our Assessments app in very different ways, from gauging the likelihood that a trusted insider is evolving into a malicious or negligent threat, to assessing the safety of students in a school district to ranking potential terrorist or cyber threats against a petrochemical facility or government agency building.
Since assessments are one of the most commonly used tools in the Haystax platform, we are constantly enhancing the app’s capabilities with features that streamline the conduct of assessments and improve analytic workflows on the resulting data.
The most significant recent enhancement relates to assessment scoring. Users can now submit assessments that can produce a score based on the answers to certain questions in the assessment. This score can be used to show the level of compliance, risk or any other high-level metric of interest to the user. Additionally, the score ranges can be classified into levels, such as High-Medium-Low, Compliant-Non-Compliant, etc., for easier classification and analysis.
Upon submission of the assessment, the score and level can be transferred to the asset (person or facility) on which the assessment is being conducted. Score and level values that appear on an Assets page are not editable and can only be updated by submitting additional assessments. These values can also be displayed in other parts of the Haystax platform, including the Assets list view, in the Map app and in reports generated from the Assets or Assessments app.
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Note: The Haystax Assessments app has undergone major transformations in the past two years as our users bring us with new use cases for which assessments would be a valuable tool. Read about some of the app’s earlier upgrades here, here and here.