Modern, forward-looking Australians need to take an integrated approach to risk management that sits across people, process and technology. A common industry phrase here is Integrated Risk Management (IRM). When businesses have a strong IRM stance, they bring together the best of IT, operations and business processes to manage all business risk from cybersecurity to strategic planning to compliance and audits.
In most organisations that we work with that have business and cybersecurity risk issues, the common fault is departments and business units failing to see business risk as their responsibility. For an organisation to build risk resiliency, they need to build an IRM strategy that interlinks with business goals and business strategy. An IRM strategy will articulate specifically how the organisation proactively researches, identifies and remediates risks while understanding the impacts. The strategy needs to be future-focused and able to accommodate business changes for up to 5 to 10 years.
You’ll need an assessment and response plan…
Once you’ve developed a strategy for how you’ll approach IRM, you need to identify, evaluate and prioritise all of the risks your organisation faces.
The first step is to break down these major areas into a grouped lists of IT/Security Risk, Operational Risk, Business Resiliency Risk and Third Party Risk. All of these grouped risks should be evaluated against:
- How does this risk affect the organisation?
- What compliance or regulatory breaches may we face?
- What are the financial repercussions if this risk occurs?
- How does this component of risk interact with other components to potentially create risks that are greater than the sum of their parts?
- Where does this component intersect with the organisations appetite for risk?
Following this you’ll want to address the top priority risks and communicate a remediation strategy for them.
Monitoring and Risk Technology
Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) are the standard metric to help you methodically and comprehensively track your compliance, risk and governance objectives across the business. These KRIs should be communicated throughout the business and be woven into the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of major business functions. With clear and relevant KRI metrics that are dovetailed throughout the business, you will be able to keep risk management on everyone’s radar.
In terms of technology, to manage these monitoring and KRIs, a robust risk function must be supported by a modern IRM technology platform, such as Archer. This technology needs to provide real-time insights, integrate seamlessly with all areas of the organisation, be streamlined and automated, and not be vulnerable to human error. And, if we’re taking requests – it needs to have an easy-to-use interface for any Risk or Compliance specialist to be able to operate.
All of these criteria are met by Archer’s Integrated Risk Management platform which has been named by Gartner a Leader for IT Risk Management. Developing and implementing a risk management platform requires strategy, assessment, response and monitoring all underpinned by great technology.
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