6 Risk Mitigation Strategies That Any Business Can Benefit From

Everything in life comes with risk attached to it. From the moment you take your first steps, which comes with a risk of falling over, you are constantly juggling risk against reward.

Starting and running a business has more risk attached to it than many people realise. And I’m not just talking about the risk of failure. Which is very real in and of itself! By starting a business, you are risking your finances, your reputation and, in many cases, your sanity. But every decision that you make also comes with risk attached to it. Who should you hire? Where should your budget be spent? Which technologies will boost your business, and which will fall flat? Which providers should you put your trust in?

Being successful is about managing and mitigating that risk, and deciding which risks are worth taking. If you don’t already have a risk mitigation strategy in place, now is the time to start putting one together. But where to start?

1. Understanding Risks

The first step in any risk mitigation strategy is always to understand where risk lies. Even if the answer is in every single thing that you do. Analysing your decisions to understand where the risk lies will help you to determine the best techniques for dealing with that risk. Whether you decide to accept the risk or avoid it, control it, transfer it, or simply monitor it, understanding that it’s there is an essential step in managing your business.

Here are just a few common risks that every business owner or manager faces:

• You could go bankrupt or end up with massive debt
• Your work could take a toll on your personal life
• You could become a victim of crime (cyber or otherwise)
• You could invest in the wrong technologies

2. Accepting Risks

Some risks are so low that the best risk mitigation strategy is simply to accept that there is a slight chance that something could go wrong, and to carry on as normal.

For example, your business premises could be hit by lightning. It would be a disaster of epic proportions! Anything electronic would be destroyed, the damage to the building would be dire, and anyone in the building itself could be seriously injured.

It’s a risk that could happen, but it’s highly unlikely. You could spend all of your energy trying to prevent a lightning strike, or to mitigate its impact. But 99.9% of the time, your time, effort and money will have been spent for nothing, as day after day your building survives untouched by lightning.

3. Avoiding Risks

On the other hand, some situations are too high-risk to even seriously consider. In these cases, the best risk mitigation strategy is to avoid the risk altogether.

For example, base jumping is the most dangerous sport in the world, with the highest number of deaths per year. Most people look at the risk involved in taking part and just decide that the sport isn’t for them.

There are risks to your business that you would approach in the same way. You could invest all of your capital into a single technology, for example, but the risk of failure, or of a low return on investment, is simply too high. Knowing which risks are too high-stakes is just as important as knowing which ones to accept.

4. Controlling Risks

While many risks are clear-cut and can either be accepted or rejected, the majority of risks that your company will face can be managed, reduced and controlled.

Implementing any new technology comes with risks associated with it, for example. There is the risk that something could go wrong during its implementation and impact your data. There’s the risk that your employees won’t embrace and adopt the new tech, seeing its value to your business significantly decrease.

These scenarios are too high-risk to simply accept, and yet the value that new technology could afford your business makes avoiding the risk altogether unfeasible. Rather, the best risk mitigation strategy to put in place would be to control the risk.

You would put measures in place to reduce the likelihood of a negative outcome. You would back your data up to the cloud, or put a Disaster Recovery services in place to ensure that if something goes wrong, it won’t be affected. You would put education and adoption plans in place to ensure that your teams make the most of the new functionality available to them. In short, you do everything in your power to mitigate the risk and make the implementation a success.

5. Transferring Risks

Not every risk that you face needs to be dealt with on your own. Sometimes you’ll want to turn to experts for both advice and implementation, and let them take control of the risks that your business faces.

This is an especially successful risk mitigation strategy to take when it comes to your IT needs. With technology being such a vital part of any business’ success, you’ll want to make sure that any technology-related risks are in the hands that are best equipped to deal with them.

IT support companies like Solid Systems have vast experience in helping businesses to implement technology solutions that help them meet their goals, and mitigate their risk. By transferring your risk to a company like Solid, you’ll find yourself doing more than just implementing the right solutions. At the same time you’ll be reducing the risk related to them. Solid Systems will take every necessary step to implement a risk mitigation strategy that suits your business. We’ll even train your teams in risk mitigation measures, like Advanced Threat Protection, that they can individually implement to keep your company as safe as possible.

6. Monitoring Risks

Risks are almost never a once-off concern. A risk that you have understood and accepted may change and evolve over time. This is why any good risk mitigation strategy needs to incorporate the regular monitoring and assessment of risks to your business.

• Regularly review the risks that you’ve accepted to ensure that they’re still reasonable.
• Review the risks that you’ve avoided in the past – with the digital landscape constantly evolving, they may be lower-risk and higher-reward than the last time you considered them.
• Analyse the way that you’re controlling your risk factors to ensure that you’re still taking the best steps for your business’ success.
• Ensure that the risks you’ve transferred to others are, in fact, being dealt with. Out of sight isn’t always out of mind, and you’ll want to ensure that your IT team or IT support company are taking the best possible steps to mitigate the risk to your business’ data and technologies.

Putting Your Risk Mitigation Strategy in Place

Ready to reduce risk for your business? Putting a risk mitigation strategy in place for your business is a complicated and constantly evolving process, but you don’t need to face risk alone. Working with an IT company like Solid Systems will not only see you transferring risk to experts in the technology field. We can help you to mitigate risk throughout your business with professional advice, strategising and roadmapping.

Implement risk mitigation methods that will see your company stepping confidently into the future. Contact us today to learn more about how Solid Systems can help.

Frequently asked questions

An IT audit is a practical first step in finding the risks above.