Tip of the Week: How to Use PEARS to Mitigate Your Organization’s IT Risks

Implementing technology solutions for your
organization always comes with a risk, and if your business is blindsided by
it, risk can derail productivity and get in the way of success. As a business
owner, understanding this risk and planning for it is critical to your
organization’s continued success. This week’s tip is dedicated to helping you
identify risk and the role it should play in your decision making.

Understanding
IT Risks

Risk balance is critical for any business, as
it gives you chances to proactively prepare for issues that could pop up.
Understanding these risks can help to keep risks from impacting operations in
the future. If you think about the problems that could result from implementing
a solution, then perhaps you can make a more educated decision about whether
you actually want to implement it.

How to
Successfully Manage IT Risks

There are various steps involved in managing
IT risks. They follow the acronym PEARS: Predict, Evaluate, Arrange, React, and
Scrutinize.

• Predict: You need to see a risk coming if you
  want to prepare for it. Take a moment to think about the risks that seem most
  probable and when they might show up.
• Evaluate: After determining the risks that are
  most probable, take some time to estimate the impact it could have on
  operations. Are they major, or are they minor?
• Arrange: Be sure to order the risks in order
  of severity and priority so you can address the important ones first. This will
  give you a strategy to approach them.
• React: You now have an idea of what your risks
  are, but you need a plan to address them. Here are some steps to take toward
  this end:
  • Avoidance: Avoiding risks isn’t the best way
    to approach them. You instead need to have other ways of actively preventing
    risky situations, as well as diffusing them.
  • Reduction: This particular way of managing
    risk focuses on making decisions in which the risk is more easily managed and
    less impactful.
  • Transference: If you have the opportunity to
    shift responsibility for the risk elsewhere, it might be worth looking into.
    This might be a department within your organization or outsourced to a
    solutions provider that would be dedicated to handling it.
  • Acceptance: This strategy in particular means
    that you can’t get around the risk, but instead have to provide oversight to
    mitigate the risks so they can be better handled when they inevitably become a
    problem.
• Scrutinize: After the risk has passed, you
  need to evaluate how well the preparations handled the risk. Take note and make
  adjustments to better handle risk in the future.

Emerge can help you better manage risk associated with your IT infrastructure. To learn more, reach out to us at 859-746-1030.