Doing business in today’s world doesn’t come without risk. Anything can happen, from a brief power failure resulting in two hours of downtime, to a days-long global technology outage precipitated by a CrowdStrike software update. How will you know what risks your business is most subject to, and how to mitigate those risks? Read on to find out what types of risks can threaten your company, and how to protect yourself.
Multiple Risks to Your Business
According to an article from CompTIA, risks come in various forms. Some are within a company’s control, and others come from outside. But all pose some threat to productivity, security or reputation–or all of these. Types of risk include:
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- Strategic: These have to do with deviations from a company’s strategy or model. Using automation, for example, can benefit operations, even facilitating software updates. However, problems can occur if human oversight isn’t part of the process.
- Competitive: negative consequences of a competitor’s actions, which can cause a loss of business for your organization. Even a competitor’s offering of a better product or service can negatively impact your business.
- Compliance: This involves failure to comply with government data security regulations, and can consist of data storage and even data breaches.
- Reputational: Events that can damage your image, and public perception of your brand. Perhaps a too-quick rollout of a product or service, a data breach, or a compromised website, can affect trust from customers and other stakeholders.
- Financial: This type of risk is anything that might cause loss of revenue. Loss of customers due to compromise of your company’s reputation, or downtime costs from even a brief system outage, can cause loss of earnings.
- Operational: Anything that affects the operation of your business or other businesses that work with you. A faulty software update can have global consequences, as was seen recently.
- Global: Can include global conflict, supply chain disruption, or nation-state cyber attacks.
Any or all of these have a potential impact on cybersecurity, though some are more likely. An outage can result in downtime (operational and financial risk), or a data breach (financial, compliance and reputational). Certain risks intersect, like financial, operational and reputational in the case of a data breach. Depending on how your company handles risk, your brand can weaken, or become stronger than ever.
How You Can Prepare
Assess and Document Your Biggest Risks
Prioritize risks most likely to affect your company’s operations, revenue or reputation. Your business may be more likely to be subject to risks of regulatory compliance failure than to global conflict. Any source of risk can impact your company, however unlikely it seems.
Assemble a Strong Team
By including people from each department, your company gets different perspectives on what can happen and how it might affect your business. For instance, sales and marketing can point out risks posed by competitors. Your leadership personnel can watch for strategic risks. Anyone can be on the alert for social engineering (“phishing”) emails.
Prepare an Incident Response Plan
All the documentation and planning will go into an incident response plan. This plan comprises the most likely risks, action plan for each, and the person or persons responsible for specific tasks. Such a plan will help you respond quickly and efficiently to possible disasters, or even keep a minor problem from becoming a major disaster.
Risk management is becoming a more common stance in companies all over the world. To learn about evaluating risks and developing a response plan, contact your trusted technology advisor today.