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.

BNMC can help you better manage risk associated with your IT infrastructure. To learn more, reach out to us at (978) 482-2020.