Technology helps businesses work effectively, identify avenues for growth, and manage their data. However, technology also invites risk by creating vulnerabilities: outdated software, lax access management, and insecure data storage are all tempting targets for hackers. Creating a technology risk management plan is the most effective way make sure that the technology your business relies on works effectively and securely.

What is technology risk?

Technology risk refers to any kind of issue caused by your business’s technology, whether it’s hardware or software. It’s a wide-ranging category, but it tends to have one or more of the following impacts:

• Loss of business continuity: business as usual can’t continue because workers can’t access the data or the services they need, causing unnecessary downtime.
• Security breaches: a hacked account or a lost work laptop can lead to data leaks, impacting your customers and damaging your reputation.
• Regulatory breaches: having your infrastructure breached by a hacker or having data leak on the dark web can lead to fines from regulatory bodies, and potentially criminal charges.
• Financial losses: downtime causes lost revenue, but there are more serious risks. Reputational damage, regulatory fines, and legal costs can cost your business a substantial amount and you could potentially cease being able to operate.

What are some examples of technology risk?

As we mentioned earlier, technology risk covers a very wide range of potential issues. For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the following:

• Software risk: this includes third party apps and services, as well as software development within your own business.
• **Hardware risk: **this includes physical objects such as laptops, tablets, and phones, as well as your servers. It also includes security keys, USBs and portable hard drives.
• Operational risk: this includes the way your day-to-day processes run, whether it’s how teams use your business software or how data is shared internally.
• Cybersecurity risk: this includes potential threats such as phishing, ransomware and other types of malware(new window). It also includes the strength of your identity and access management, for example whether MFA is deployed throughout your organization.
• Compliance risk: this includes how and where your client and customer data is stored, as well as your overall compliance with local data regulations.

Your business needs to plan for technology risk

Technology risk isn’t something that only affects under-resourced or under-prepared businesses: it’s simply a byproduct of using technology. It can happen to businesses of any size in any industry, and broadly any institution using technology.

The U.S. Treasury Department was affected by a major cyber incident(new window) in 2025 caused by a compromised remote support tool **— **Chinese hackers were able to access documents thanks to the remote support tool being a single point of failure in the Treasury’s access management. Australian airline Qantas saw more than 11 million of its customer records leaked on the dark web following an attack from a group of hackers. Sensitive customer data including names, addresses and email addresses were leaked.

Don’t assume that your organization is too small to be targeted by hackers, or that you can operate without any kind of technology risk plan. It’s time to make a plan.

Create a technology risk management plan

Your technology risk management plan will protect your business day-to-day and ensure that you’re meeting your organizational security standards as well as regulatory requirements. It combines policies, procedures, and tools to help you manage potential risk introduced by the technology within your business. It should be a living document that you revisit whenever changes are made to your IT infrastructure, and that you amend as and when your business requirements change.

Typically, an IT risk management plan follows roughly the same steps regardless of the specific needs of the business creating it. We’ll go through the process of creating your business’s tailored technology risk management plan step by step to help you understand how to get started.

Conduct a technology risk assessment

A good technology risk management plan begins with a risk assessment. This is a key step of the process because it helps you identify areas of your business and assets within it that are the most valuable or that pose the most risk. Create a list of:

• Every business application across any and all of your systems
• Every business device such as laptops, phones, and tablets
• Every data set and its location
• Every device accessed according to your “bring your own device” (BYOD) plan
• Every server and/or data center

The aim of this exercise is to create a holistic view of your business, allowing you to identify vulnerabilities and risks. You can also delegate stakeholders within your business who’ll take responsibility for risk assessment and management in their respective business areas. This usually includes your IT department as well as finance, legal, compliance and leadership.

Assess and prioritize potential technology risks

Once you’ve identified every asset, you can begin to assess the impact of potential risks and how they could affect your business. Make sure to look for risks including:

• Vulnerability to security threats such as phishing scams, ransomware, and other malware
• Outdated or legacy systems and unsupported software
• Insecure login practices or lack of two-factor authentication (2FA) for critical services
• Data breaches

Once you’ve identified every potential risk, you can begin prioritizing your resources accordingly. Choose extra cybersecurity measures to protect your most valuable assets and make sure to build a zero-knowledge approach to the most sensitive data stored in your network.

Start planning risk mitigation

Ultimately, you need to prepare for the event that a risk does occur. Creating strategies to prevent or mitigate risks is a realistic approach that your business can only benefit from. For example, in the event that a team member’s business account is compromised, how easy is it to remove access from users?

Mitigation and reduction methods vary depending on your business needs, but consider starting with the basics:

• Create an incident response plan. This will act as your business’s guide to reacting to an incident, and it can make all the difference to have it ready when and if a data breach or a hack occurs.
• If your business stores sensitive data across multiple (and potentially insecure) locations, reduce the spread. Secure business password managers and cloud storage can make a huge difference to the security of your business data, as well as improving access management.
• Consider new technical controls that improve your business’s cybersecurity whilst also increasing productivity. For example. SSO is an excellent way to ensure that access management is streamlined for your IT admins, allowing them to manage user accounts from a single location and remove access instantly if necessary.
• Consider upgrading legacy systems that have become vulnerable or inefficient and ensure that the latest version of all business applications are deployed.
• Make sure that your risk stakeholders are communicating effectively about technology best practices and how to avoid risk in their respective departments.
• Conduct regular training, both in person and online where possible. Keep the conversation about technology risk going with every team member so that it’s always top of mind.

Monitor for risk

The more you invest in monitoring potential technology risks, the more you can mitigate them. Detecting potential data breaches or cyberattacks early helps your business greatly reduce their potential impact. With this in mind, dark web monitoring and usage logs are useful tools for spotting unauthorized logins and data breaches. Set up processes that allow you to monitor activity in your network, then review the effectiveness of those processes over time. Iteration will help your business find the most effective controls for your environment and business needs.