IT risk

Information technology risk, or IT risk, IT-related risk, is any risk related to information technology. While information has long been appreciated as a valuable and important asset, the rise of the knowledge economy and the Digital Revolution has led to organizations becoming increasingly dependent on information, information processing and especially IT. Various events or incidents that compromise IT in some way can therefore cause adverse impacts on the organization's business processes or mission, ranging from inconsequential to catastrophic in scale.

Assessing the probability of likelihood of various types of event/incident with their predicted impacts or consequences should they occur is a common way to assess and measure IT risks. Alternative methods of measuring IT risk typically involve assessing other contributory factors such as the threats, vulnerabilities, exposures, and asset values.

IT risk: the potential that a given threat will exploit vulnerabilities of an asset or group of assets and thereby cause harm to the organization. It is measured in terms of a combination of the probability of occurrence of an event and its consequence.

The Committee on National Security Systems of United States of America defined risk in different documents:

National Information Assurance Training and Education Center defines risk in the IT field as:

Many NIST publications define risk in IT context in different publications: FISMApedia term provide a list. Between them:

NIST SP 800-30 defines:

IT risk is the probable frequency and probable magnitude of future loss.

ISACA published the Risk IT Framework in order to provides an end-to-end, comprehensive view of all risks related to the use of IT. There, IT risk is defined as:

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