According to ISO 31000, Risk management is a term that defines the identification, the prioritization and the analysis of numerous risks that might be associated with a system, a company, investment or virtually any other kind of project.
Once a thorough risk analysis has been carried out, it is important for companies to make sure that they carefully allocate their resources in order to minimize and thoroughly monitor and control their systems so as to mitigate the chances of damage.
Both economical and non- economical factors have to be carefully assessed while devising a risk management strategy.
Risk management in networking has a number of different facets that must be dealt with carefully.
First of all, the most important thing to keep in mind is to make sure that the system is protected enough to prevent intrusions from external forces. Viruses, hacking attempts and worm injections are all common threats that are faced by top networks all over the globe, and they must develop a powerful system that is robust enough to deal with all of these threats.
Now, when it comes to risk management, the company must always prepare for the worst.
From creating additional firewalls to creating full scale backups and one touch emergency shut downs, it is vitally important to ensure that a careful, tiered risk management approach is set up.
Managing risk in a controlled environment is much easier as opposed to an uncontrolled one, and this means that managers need to be very careful in setting up the whole system to be set up for all kinds of threats.
What happens if a virus gets in behind the firewall? How does the system deal with this? Which sectors will be closed first? All of these are vitally important things that must be catered to in detail while creating a risk management strategy.
The most common risk management approach usually deals with a set of alternatives; these include transferring the threat to another party altogether, or mitigating the damage that is involved, avoiding the threat completely by making use of mitigating factors in order to neutralize the threat and in the last scenario, reducing the effects of the damage that might be caused by the threat.
For any company that deals in networking, creating an effective risk management strategy is of vital importance.
Companies must make use of powerful vulnerability scanners in order to figure out the different points of exposure that can be used against them, and then make use of security programs in order to prevent this from happening.
Then, the companies must set up contingencies in case a leakage occurs and a virus enters in to their system. Creating a risk management strategy for a network company is usually a job that is outsourced to other companies which specialize in this regard, as these companies have in depth knowledge and experience on how to deal with threats, and as a result can create an effective strategy.