Let’s speak nowadays regarding IT risk assessment. When ought to we perform such risk assessments and what impact them might have on our business.

I’ve been working in Massive 4 Company for the 5 years and what I perpetually hear around me – is IT risk assessment. I hear this at money audit engagements, I hear it at it audits, at business continuity and disaster recovery projects – I hear this term everywhere in this business.

The most goal of the IT risk assessment – is to confirm the normal and uninterruptable processing of your business. This involves traditional operation of your application systems, operating systems, network equipment, database, etc. That’s why the IT risk assessment process should be incorporated in each IT process. For instance, let’s have a look at the change management process. When you intend to form any changes to your IT infrastructure, you ought to ensure that such changes will not negatively impact your traditional operation and your business can still opera and generate money for you. The most effective manner to achieve this goal is to perform preliminary IT risk assessment for each changes to IT infrastructure (application systems changes, database changes, network changes, operating system changes).

By performing IT risk assessment you ought to think about the subsequent questions:

· How this alteration can affect existing operations?

· Will we have a tendency to want to disrupt our operations? If therefore, for the way long? What would be the price of disruption?

· What organizational units will be affected?

· How much this variation will price to the business?

· How this transformation can affect the existing hardware?

· How this modification will have an effect on the present software?

· What actions must be accomplished to confirm normal operations once amendment implementation?

· Do we tend to have a whole set of backup knowledge for each affected system?

· Can we tend to restore the previous state of the affected systems in case of failure during amendment implementation?

All these queries must have applicable answers whereas performing an IT risk assessment.

Currently let’s take a look at another very vital half of our IT processes. It’s our Business Continuity strategy. While making of this strategy you need to complete a method called Business Impact Analysis – this is often for identifying of all processes and systems that should be included in the Continuity strategy. However additionally it might be a smart apply to complete an IT risk assessment at this stage. By doing so, you need to think about the impact of your current IT systems to your Continuity strategy and the impact of the Continuity strategy to your IT systems. Such IT risk assessment will facilitate establish any potential vulnerabilities in the processes that will be exploited in future and fail the Continuity of operations.

My personal belief is that nowadays’s organizations ought to forever keep in mind concerning vital impact of recent IT infrastructure on their day-to-day business activities, and they should perform comprehensive IT risk assessment before considering any changes to the existing IT processes and infrastructure.

Your risk assessment procedures should be forever formal and you must retain your IT risk assessment reports for future reference and resolution of potential questions.