The need to conduct vulnerability and risk assessments is being driven by these new laws and mandates. Organizations must now be information security conscious and must develop and implement proper security controls based on the results of their internal risk assessment and vulnerability assessment. By conducting a risk assessment and vulnerability assessment, an organization can uncover known weaknesses and vulnerabilities in its existing IT infrastructure, prioritize the impact of these vulnerabilities based on the value and importance of affected IT and data assets, and then implement the proper security controls and security countermeasures to mitigate those identified weaknesses. This risk mitigation results in increased security and less probability of a threat or vulnerability impacting an organization’s production environment.