Risky Business: 8 Things You Need to Know about Information Risk

Risk can be good. Like playing Risk. Or risking your life to save your pet chinchilla Eugene from being swallowed whole by a seemingly amicable falcon. But when it comes to your information, risk is…well, risky. Read the 8 Things You Need to Know about Information Risk to save yourself the blood, sweat, and tears of lost, inaccessible, or stolen information. George Parapadakis outlines the eight main types of risk:

Photo: adcet.edu.au

1. We didn’t need it (Non-capture) - The risk of critical information not being captured into the system.

2. It was on the disk that crashed (Loss) – The risk of captured information being accidentally removed from the system.

3. That is not my signature (Malice) – The risk of information being deliberately removed, corrupted or damaged.

4. March.xls – but which year? (Attribution) - The risk of losing the context and metadata describing the information.

5. Where did you get this? It’s confidential! (Unauthorized Access) – The risk of information being accessed by unauthorized persons.

6. The system is down (Unavailability) – The risk of disaster or technical failures, preventing access to the information.

7. But where is it? (Findability) – The risk of information being lost inside the digital landfill due to lack of sufficient classification.

8. Does anyone have SuperWriter 2.0? (Inaccessibility) – The risk of information becoming inaccessible due to its medium or format.

How can you use document management to combat these risks, you ask? Take a look at the article for more on that. As a preview, here’s what Parapadakis recommends for the third risk, Malice:

For information to be relevant and useful to the business, the organization needs to ensure that not only documents and content be retained and managed securely, but the context or information used to describe them (metadata, relationships and processes) also need to be carefully managed too. This is especially true in large enterprises where content may be captured through many different systems and sit in different repositories, but is openly available across the organization through an Enterprise Content Management system.

Stay tuned for more on how you can use document management to mitigate information risk in your workplace.