Measuring Risk. Defining Direction.
A Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Written for the Business Owner
New York — and a growing number of states — now expect covered financial services firms to conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment and keep it current as the business changes. Much of the same ground appears on your cyber insurance application. Vector produces one assessment that serves both: anchored in NIST and NY DFS Part 500, and written for the owner who has to weigh cyber risk alongside every other decision in the business.
A Partner Who Knows the Business
A Cybersecurity Risk Assessment Is More Than a Technical Exercise
An agency runs on carrier relationships, compliance requirements, producer agreements, and client trust. Cyber risk touches every one of them, and a cyber risk advisor can be a valuable voice in your business. An assessor fluent in controls but unfamiliar with distribution produces findings that create work rather than resolve it — recommendations that collide with a carrier requirement, overlook a supervisory obligation, or ask a twelve-person agency to operate like a bank.
Clients
Your clients assume the financial and personal information they hand you is looked after. Being able to answer that plainly, from a document rather than an assurance, is becoming part of what it means to be a professional firm.
Agents
Producers work from their own devices, their own offices, and their own choice of tools. Where that widens the firm's exposure — and what is reasonable to ask of them — is part of the assessment rather than an afterthought.
Carriers and Broker-Dealers
We work with your carrier partners to deliver precisely what they expect from your firm, in the form their due diligence asks for, so a questionnaire is answered from a document you already have.
Compliance
We know what a firm in your position has to do to be compliant. Findings are written so the obligations you already carry are answered, not reopened.
Why This Is a Yearly Exercise
The Cybersecurity Risks to Your Business Evolve Every Year
A producer drafting client correspondence in an AI assistant. A new carrier portal. A personal device in the field. Your risk exposure changes every year, both from day-to-day operations and from the rapidly evolving technical environment where you operate.
An assessment describes where the firm stands on the day it is written. What makes it worth repeating is that the risks keep changing underneath it.
New Tools, Websites, and Applications
AI assistants, meeting note-takers, file-sharing accounts, browser extensions. Useful software arrives one person at a time, and rarely through anyone who would think to ask about the data going into it.
New Connections
A carrier portal, a platform migration, an integration built to solve a real problem. Each one opens a path into or out of your environment that did not exist at the last assessment.
Changes to the Team
A book of business brought over, producers joining or leaving, staff turning over, people working from equipment the firm does not own. The team changes faster than the documentation describing it does.
Method
Anchored in Recognized Frameworks, Delivered in Your Language
We assess against standards your regulator, your carrier, and your counterparties already recognize — the NIST Cybersecurity Framework for structure, and the NY DFS Part 500 requirements where they apply to your firm. The rigor belongs in the methodology. The output belongs in the language of the business.
Evidence-Based Conclusions
Every control conclusion is tied to what was observed or produced. Where evidence was unavailable, the assessment says so and rates it accordingly.
Written for the Business Owner
Key details and conclusions are easily understood by the busy business owner. Terminology that requires a background in security stays in the appendix, where it is useful rather than an obstacle.
Additional Service
Cyber Insurance Application and Control Alignment Review
Cyber insurance runs on the trust system. Nobody checks your application answers when you submit them. They get checked when you file a claim.
Your answers were given in good faith — but are you certain the firm actually meets what the insurer was told? We review the cybersecurity representations in your application, renewal, or supplemental questionnaire against the evidence gathered during the assessment, and identify responses that appear unsupported, partially supported, or ambiguous while there is still time to do something about them.
Available as an add-on to the annual assessment. You provide the application materials; we compare them to what the evidence shows.
Get Started
Contact Us to Begin
Tell us about your firm and we will outline what an assessment would cover, what it asks of your team, and what it costs.