Importance Of Risk Assessment In Risk Management

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3. Risk Assessment and the Risk Management Process
Risk management is a general topic that looks at how all risks are managed across the organization.

The number and type of risks an organization face in today’s world are many and varied.
As an example, organizations face risks to the value of their own organization through the stock market fluctuations and shareholder lawsuits for mismanagement. These are just two risks organizations face with regard to the value of the organization. The value of the organization impacts its ability to raise additional capital, the interest rates it gets on loans, and the rating of any bonds the organization will issue or has issued. This is just one type of risk management focused on financial risks. There …show more content…

All the risks identified will bias the controls to be setup and will all also be addressed in business’s continuity and disaster recovery plans.

At this point let us consider the following definitions, to create a common ground:
• Risks: a Threat that exploits a Vulnerability of an Asset
• Threats: any natural or man-made circumstance that is a potential cause of an unwanted incident which may result in harm to a system or an organisation
• Vulnerabilities: an absence or a weakness of a safeguard or control of an asset or a group of assets which may be exploited by a threat
• Probability of a Risk to occur (self explanatory)
• Impacts: impact over organizational assets
• Asset Value: specific value associated to an asset (this is a very difficult if not impossible task)
• Cost to protect an asset: very important info to management, assessed in next paragraph
• Asset’s replacement cost: very important info to management, assessed in next paragraph

3.1. Threat, Vulnerability and Impact …show more content…

If the organization spends 20,000£ on various systems to keep an asset up and running, that is 20,000£ the organization cannot spend on something else, such as marketing materials, advertising, employee wages or in new, more effective and resilient systems. In addition, there is the cost of the downtime versus the cost of the solution. What does one hour of downtime of that asset cost to the organization? That is the opportunity cost of downtime. It is important to understand that for every activity that occurs, some other activity cannot occur, and management will be always analysing

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