As reliance on digital tools grows, so do the risks of data leaks, disruptive outages, and cyberattacks. Indeed, 62% of organizations experienced a critical risk event from 2016 to 2019. And recently, the problematic impact of cyberattacks has escalated sharply –– since the pandemic cybercrime has risen by 600%.
Every business must be prepared to effectively handle and deploy a robust risk management strategy. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, risk management is the practice of identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks to your systems, data, and business.
A good risk management strategy can look different for every organization. However, there are some universal tactics that will support your risk detection and empower your team to prevent escalation.
Universal Approaches to Tactical Risk Management Strategy
1. Rank Your Risks
One way to notably enhance your risk management strategy is by implementing a risk ranking system. A ranking system will help you decide what types of risks are most severe, what impact they will have, and how likely they are to occur.
The benefit of creating unique risk scores is that it improves speed and efficiency. Risk ranking helps your teams quickly assess and prevent the most harmful risks, triage the most critical problems, and minimize business damage.
2. Document All Risks in a Risk Register
Another best practice to fuel risk management success is to set up a risk register. A risk register is a centralized information repository that outlines risks, reveals their causes, category, cost and time to mitigate, etc.
A risk register can be repurposed for widespread use across a business, including IT, project management, finance, and cybersecurity, to name a few. For best results, a risk register should be continuously updated and maintained to address the fluid, evolving nature of the digital era.
3. Ongoing Risk Monitoring and Evaluation
There is no such thing as “set-it-and-forget-it” in risk management. Instead, the most effective strategies require continuous risk monitoring and evaluation. Compounded with this, varying departments will have unique processes for risk monitoring.
To properly manage the frequency and diversity of risk monitoring, it’s advisable to implement helpful tools like ITSM software. ITSM platforms will typically provide IT automation-powered workflows that can support regular risk maintenance. Teams can build risk evaluation and monitoring workflows that trigger automatically, which may also include automatic approvals and triage settings for the most urgent evaluation and tracking tasks.
4. Involve Your Entire Organization
Risk management isn’t just relegated to project managers, ops teams, and IT. Every employee can play a part in identifying risks and raising the alarm if an incident does occur. Leadership should encourage a culture of risk awareness where everyone shares the responsibility to protect the company from cyberattacks, data leaks, system outages, or project and operational disruptions.
To successfully foster this culture of ownership, leadership should train all their teams on the basics of risk management. Offering an internal knowledge base or content hub is a helpful way to keep the library of training materials and information readily accessible. Some ITSM platforms come with a content hub in the portal where you can house all the documentation pertaining to risk management.
5. Leverage ITSM Software to Successfully Manage Risk
An ITSM solution is a highly efficient tool for organizing and standardizing your risk management practices. In addition, most ITSM platforms include IT automation, which can be purposed for risk-relevant tasks.
As we briefly touched upon earlier, your teams can set up complex workflows that trigger automatically with an ITSM solution. It’s also possible to embed risk management SOPs within tickets, with step-by-step instructions as needed.
Approvals can also be automated and pre-determined for quick communication and risk mitigation. And based on your risk ranking and register, you can create priority settings that automatically move the most critical risks to the front of the queue.
IT automation allows you to set up trackable, repeatable processes to combat risk, which can help prevent real threats from impacting your business.
If you’re curious about how an ITSM solution can help you manage risk, try DeskDirector for free to see the impact for yourself.
