#3: Integrated Risk Management

Expanding responsibilities across the enterprise

To effectively mitigate today’s ever-evolving threat landscape, more businesses are creating an organization-wide risk-aware culture and strategy—more commonly known as integrated risk management (IRM).

IRM involves a series of policies, controls, and procedures tailored to business needs and success metrics. At its core, IRM moves risk management away from department silos and a compliance checklist mindset to an overarching framework that links risks to business contexts and outcomes.

Shared accountability, smarter decisions

Both security and non-IT leaders within the organization—including C-suite executives in HR, operations, and marketing—shoulder responsibility and accountability for ensuring organizational security.

Among its biggest benefits, IRM enables informed decision-making for all aspects of the business and provides leadership teams with a more accurate, more comprehensive picture of their risk management performance across the board.

Supporting the culture

Changing a culture and gaining traction for IRM within an organization can be difficult, but having the right tools in place helps considerably. The most effective software tools and practices will:

Enable the simple sharing of risk data
Facilitate collaboration across departments
Fit easily into existing systems
Minimize the learning curve for users
Provide robust reporting and analytics
Track compliance

“Where collaborative risk functions used to be the exception, they now need to be the norm. Even sophisticated companies, especially those in non-regulated industries, have yet to address a lack of integration across risk categories and functions. Integration clears away speed bumps along with unnecessary complexities and costs.”

- PwC Pulse Survey 2022

⁶EY 2022 CEO Imperative Survey