How can you manage the risks of expanding your online presence?

2 Assess your online risks

The next step is to assess your online risks and prioritize them according to their severity and urgency. You can use a risk matrix to classify your risks into four categories: high, medium, low, and negligible. A high-risk scenario is one that has a high impact and a high likelihood of occurring, such as a major data breach that exposes sensitive customer information and leads to lawsuits and fines. A medium-risk scenario is one that has a high impact but a low likelihood of occurring, or a low impact but a high likelihood of occurring, such as a temporary website outage that affects your sales or a minor security incident that requires remediation. A low-risk scenario is one that has a low impact and a low likelihood of occurring, such as a typo on your website or a negative comment on social media. A negligible-risk scenario is one that has no significant impact or likelihood of occurring, such as a spam email that is filtered out by your system.

3 Mitigate your online risks

The third step is to mitigate your online risks and reduce their impact and likelihood. You can use a risk mitigation strategy to decide how to deal with each risk category. For high-risk scenarios, you need to avoid or eliminate the risk by implementing preventive measures, such as using encryption, firewalls, antivirus software, backups, passwords, and authentication. For medium-risk scenarios, you need to reduce or transfer the risk by implementing corrective measures, such as updating your software, patching your vulnerabilities, monitoring your network, and buying insurance. For low-risk scenarios, you need to accept or share the risk by implementing contingency measures, such as having a backup plan, communicating with your customers, and collaborating with your partners. For negligible-risk scenarios, you can ignore or monitor the risk by implementing routine measures, such as checking your website performance, reviewing your feedback, and following best practices.

4 Review your online risks

The fourth step is to review your online risks and monitor their evolution. You need to update your risk analysis and assessment regularly, as your online activities and environment may change over time. You need to track your risk indicators and metrics, such as your website traffic, conversion rate, bounce rate, customer retention, security incidents, and customer complaints. You also need to evaluate your risk mitigation actions and measure their effectiveness, such as your security audits, recovery time, customer satisfaction, and return on investment. You need to learn from your experience and feedback and improve your risk management process and practices.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?