Successfully creating and implementing an effective risk and resiliency strategy can be a difficult task for organizations as it requires full situational awareness and an integrated view of business processes accompanied by significant information gathering and risk intelligence. Organizations often struggle with this as their primary goal is to dedicate their resources to managing current risk and resiliency processes and often lack time for analysis and alteration.
If organizations are bogged down by manual processes, there is little time for analysis and objective setting. Organizations must prioritize achieving effectiveness, efficiency, and agility with their risk and resiliency processes and this can be done through the implementation of technology architecture. Technology that can automate processes and thus increase efficiency and agility will greatly reduce costs while improving accuracy.
It is important to note that any effective risk and resiliency strategy is sustainable and plans to prevent risk rather than prioritize mitigation once the risk has occurred. Once risk and resilience processes are automated through the implementation of a technology architecture allowing for the organization to have more resources at its disposal, the next step is to ensure that the risk and resilience strategy is fine-tuned by considering these factors:
· Flexibility. An effective risk and resiliency strategy must be flexible to effectively plan for and prevent future risk. The business world is extremely dynamic as risks can change and new ones can appear in an instant. It is essential that identified risks are constantly monitored to ensure that the policies and procedures that are in place remain an effective combatant to the specified risk.
· Higher Risk Means Stronger Controls. In other words, prioritizing is key. An accurate assessment must be kept of various risks to determine where resources need to be dedicated. Third-parties or other high-risk situations require the greatest number of controls and processes whereas small or negligible risks can receive little attention.
· Know Who You are Doing Business With. This goes hand in hand with the previous point as third parties can pose serious risks to the organization. Continuous analysis of business partners must be kept while deploying stronger controls to those that pose greater risks.
Once a proper analysis has been done it is time for the implementation of policies and procedures. Policies will be the organization’s best defense against identified risks and ensure that employees and business partners are following set procedures of risk management. As previously mentioned, risks are dynamic and therefore require policies to be dynamic as well. Policies must always be monitored and analyzed to ensure that the policy is achieving the goal it was created to accomplish. If a policy is underperforming or a specific risk appears to have changed, the policy must change with it.
