Taking a Calculated Risk

Estimating the cost of a security incident in an organisation, business or institution is a difficult task, that’s why NPSA has developed a bespoke tool to help security managers in the UK obtain a realistic estimate of the cost of losing a critical asset – The Asset Cost Estimation Tool (ACET). 

Requiring only three key pieces of information; annual turnover, estimated number of full-time employees and business sector, the tool can help you to identify your critical assets, be it people, processes, information, technology or facilities, and deliver an estimate of financial loss should any of these be affected by a security incident. 

The tool also provides sector-specific industry standard estimates for those who do not have detailed figures. The ACET instantly provides users with an estimate of their overall percentage loss, alongside a breakdown estimate for each identified asset. 

The ACET also produces user-friendly downloadable graphs and charts enabling users to visualise estimated losses, reasonable worst-case scenarios, and exposure per asset. Additionally, the ACET provides users with a comparison to other organisations in their selected sector. 

Estimates produced by the ACET can be used to evaluate and prioritise options, support business cases, inform investment decisions, and focus attention on actions needed to protect critical assets where sufficient open source data is available.

The ACET does not store any inputted data, nor is it logged or cached. 

As NPSA continues to develop and refine this free of charge and secure tool, we encourage your feedback to [email protected].