36 Types of Technology Risk

John Spacey, updated on April 26, 2016

Information technology risk is the potential for technology shortfalls to result in losses. This includes the potential for project failures, operational problems and information security incidents. The following are common types of IT risk.

Architecture Risk

IT structures that fail to support operations or projects.

Artificial Intelligence Risks

A special category of risk associated with technologies that learn and self improve.

Asset Management Risk

Failure to control IT assets such as loss of mobile devices.

Audit Risk

The chance that an IT audit will miss things such as security vulnerabilities or legacy risks.

Availability

Downtime of IT services.

Benefit Shortfall

Investments in IT that fail to achieve projected return on investment.

Budget Risk

IT programs, projects or operations teams that go over budget. In many cases, going under budget is considered a positive risk.

Capacity

Capacity management failures such as an overloaded network connection that causes inefficiencies such as process failures.

Change Control

A failure to control change to complex systems including practices such as change management and configuration management.

Compliance Violations

The potential that you will violate laws or regulations.

Contract Risk

A counterparty that fails to meet its contractual obligations to you such as violations of a service level agreement.

Data Loss

Loss of data that can not be restored.

Data Quality

Poor quality data that causes losses due to factors such as process failures, compliance issues or declining customer satisfaction.

Decision Quality

Sub-optimal decision automation or inaccurate decision support information such as analytics.

Design Debt

A low quality design that results in future costs.

Facility Risk

Risks related to facilities such as data centers.

Infrastructure Risk

Failures of basic services such as networks, power and computing resources.

Innovation Risk

A special category of risk associated with experimentation and aggressive rates of change. Typically requires novel approaches to risk management such as designing activities to fail well.

Integration Risk

The potential for integration of organizations, departments, processes, technology or data to fail.

Legacy Technology

Technology that is out of the date to the extent that it is difficult to maintain and at risk of failures.

Operational Risk

The potential for technology failures to disrupt core business processes.

Partner Risk

Risks associated with technology partners such as service providers.

Physical Security

Physical security related to IT such as security at data centers.

Process Risk

The potential for processes to be disrupted by IT failures.

Procurement Risk

Procurement is the purchasing of services, products and resources. It is prone to a number of risks including the chance of fraud, cost and quality issues.

Project Risk

In many cases, IT projects have a high rate of failure due to a number of risk factors such as scope creep, estimation errors and resistance to change.