Traditionally, the complex world of cybersecurity has been left solely to information security professionals to defend the organization's sensitive information and systems. But the recent spate of high-profile data breaches and warnings from regulators has caught the attention of C-level executives and board members. Cybersecurity is no longer just a technical issue, as a breach can have a major impact on the viability of an organization – loss of brand reputation, jobs, customers and partners, and most importantly a negative impact on the bottom line.

Now that execs recognize the need to prioritize cybersecurity, where do they begin? Understanding the cyber risks an organization faces and extrapolating the potential business impact is tough using traditional cybersecurity solutions, which produce volumes of low-level, machine-based data. This method requires significant effort and resources to understand whether a threat is relevant to the business, how big an impact it could have, and how to address it.

Translating the fire hose of threat data into information that can be easily understood and used to educate the rest of the organization is an approach taken by SurfWatch Labs, a provider of cyber risk intelligence solutions. Looking at cyber data through a business intelligence lens ensures that security-related trends and potential impacts to organizations can be understood and effectively addressed. This slideshow contains a high-level view of cyber risk analysis contained in SurfWatch Cyber Risk Reports, which aggregate, standardize and analyze cyber-related information for the top four most active industries.

Jason Polancich, founder and chief architect, SurfWatch Labs, is a serial entrepreneur focused on solving complex Internet security and cyber-defense problems, with more than 20 years of experience as an intelligence analyst, software engineer, systems architect and corporate executive. Prior to founding SurfWatch Labs, Mr. Polancich co-founded Novii Design, which assisted the U.S. intelligence community and Department of Defense in building some of the largest data warehouse and analysis systems ever put into operation within the government and defense contracting sectors.