Risk can be elusive.
Collectively, we spend so much time thinking about how to operate our businesses efficiently that it becomes difficult to take the time to slow down and identify things that may have fallen through the cracks and exposed compliance or security risks.
The team of risk mitigation experts here at Cask specializes in empowering businesses by consulting and implementing tools to centralize governance, risk, and compliance tasks so they’re easy to understand and even easier to carry out.
When we begin working with a new client, there’s a series of questions we always ask to get a sense of the risk they’re dealing with. In an effort to help you streamline the risk assessment process we started developing in our last installment of this series on GRC maturity (New to the series? Start here! ), we’re sharing some of our insightful questions with you.
1. Do you have a risk management plan?
While this seems a bit basic, we know the chaos of an urgent risk makes remediation harder to carry out effectively—not easier. You don’t want to be searching for the stairwell after your building catches fire. That’s why we start with this simple question so we understand what level of work is cut out for us.
2. Who identifies risks?
This is important to have—or find—an answer to. In the day-to-day shuffle when nothing immediate is on fire, the responsibility for risk identification is something that’s easy to forget about or assume someone else is doing.
It’s essential to pick a team member who knows it’s his or her duty to keep watch. Remember that when something is everyone’s responsibility it becomes no one’s responsibility.
3. Any due dates for assessing a risk?
Unchecked time is risk’s best friend. What might be identified as a relatively harmless issue can snowball into a much bigger problem if ignored for long enough.
Because of this, you’ll want to keep a pretty tight timeline in place for assessing risk, dealing with it, and moving on. Schedule check-ins and other specific events with everyone who’s involved in risk and security management to make sure the timing stays on track.
4. How do you decide to close a risk?
Open risks are extremely stressful on a team. It’s important to develop a checklist by which, upon completion, a risk can be marked retired and your team’s bandwidth is freed up to take on new challenges.
With each closed risk, your team will gain the confidence of knowing they can handle whatever comes their way next.
If you’re looking for a resource to reinforce the things your organization is already doing right, point out a few things to improve upon, and give you a clearer sense of what GRC maturity looks like overall—look no further than Cask’s experienced GRC strategy and implementation team.
Contact Cask today or keep following along with this blog series to develop a GRC strategy that protects you from compliance and security meltdowns.
