Edmonton’s Kirsten Poon Discusses 5 Strategies for Effective IT Governance and Risk Management
Managing IT risk can feel like a juggling act, especially in the vibrant and innovative city of Edmonton, where technology is constantly evolving.
Between staying on top of the latest tech trends, protecting valuable data, and ensuring your team is performing at its best, it can quickly become overwhelming.
But don’t stress! Even for IT governance and risk management to be effective, it doesn’t have to be complex or forceful.
With just a few best practices, you can keep your IT environment safe, compliant, and well-managed.
Think of it like setting up the right systems to help things run smoothly and safely within your organization.
And with insights from experts like Kirsten Poon, you can make this process simpler than you think.
Below are five easy yet powerful practices you can use to master IT risk and governance.
1. Policies and Procedures
However, risk management should first be set on the right footing in order to maximize efficiency.
Which means, coherent, understandable IT policies and procedures have to be established.
These are the official rules for all matters technological within your enterprise ,including how exactly your data is to be protected, and how your software updates are to be managed.
Lack of a set of rules that needs to be followed can lead to so much confusion.
Preparing comprehensive procedures will benefit your team in terms of maintaining focus while working on delivering your services, it will also guarantee the protection of your company’s information, as well as compliance with all the necessary standards.
Well, then make certain it is clear to all that they know what is expected of them!
2. Identify and Prioritize Risks
To a large extent, managing IT risk is all about focus.
In business, it is impossible to avoid all risks, yet it is possible to avoid most of those that can negatively impact an organization most.
The first step is to define what risks might exist for your business — this could be anythin from hackers to systems’ breakdown.
After identifying risks, one needs to figure out which of the mentioned risks can have the most severe consequences.
In this context, the goal is to identify key risks that would require your attention and resources in order to avoid them and turn them into threats which cause minimal harm to the business.
This will help you avoid spending too much time on risks that are not so significant, and this is how you’ll achieve that.
3. Regular Monitoring and Auditing
Imagine that your IT systems are your car – you wouldn’t simply drive it until it fails, would you?
The same thing applies to your technology support structure.
Such problems should be prevented by means of regular monitoring and auditing of your systems.
This is a way of monitoring all matters concerning the network security and policies complied to in the organization.
In this case you can also automate your tools to assist in the monitoring of your system and always remember to perform checks and balances to ensure that the systems provide optimal output.
Here the following steps will assist you in preventing the weaknesses from being actual threats and enable you to make corrections where necessary.
4. Human Resource Training and Employee Awareness
Where protecting information is concerned, as well as the other facets of IT governance and risk management, one component that is often overlooked is that a massive amount of it has to do with people.
Your team is the frontline in matters concerning cybersecurity and other possible risks within the organization.
However for your team to work well, those involved need to know what they are against.
More importantly, in order to maintain everyone on the right track training and awareness programs must be done periodically.
No matter whether you’re discussing the differences between various kinds of phishing scams with your employees or explaining how they should manage the sensitive information – allowing your team to be knowledgeable will reduce your exposures greatly.
This means getting your team in a much better position to start mitigating and, overall, to remain safe when everybody knows what to seek and how to act.
5. Have a Response Plan in Place
Yet as good as companies may be, there always will be setbacks — that’s the reality of commerce and computing.
But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck! Level nine is the ability to carry out a well-articulated response plan after an emergency or incident has occurred.
No matter if it is a leak of data, a network or computer failure or a security event you have to be sure of the actions that must be done.
This could embrace everything right from managing the problem to informing the stakeholders to having your systems up and running again.
For this reason, it is always good to be prepared so that if the event hits, it does not catch you unprepared and has a way of coming for a long time as this will help you to minimize on the effects it leaves behind.
Conclusion
This paper concludes that it is not complicated to manage IT governance and risk management.
If you follow these five ideas, below, you will be well on your way to improving the workflows across your IT space while also guaranteeing that they are secure and compliant.
Effective risk management begins with formulating clear ascertainable policies and practices, risk identification, risk prioritization, and periodic surveillance of your systems.
Teaching your team should not be left out and make sure that you have a good plan that needs to be followed in the event of some occurrences.
By having these strategies with you, you will not only be in a position to handle your IT governance and risks but will also help keep your and business on the right course.
Through doing this, you will not only protect your business but develop a strong and elastic IT environment which will sustain the growing changes.
It’s all about having a tip and knowing more than the other competitor!
