As we learn to live with the pandemic-driven digital acceleration, heightened use of new technologies, the proliferation of IoT devices and continued remote working, risk teams are busy. They are increasingly focusing on enterprise-wide collaboration to help business teams navigate the complex and ever-changing threat environment, whilst enabling the use of newer technology within their businesses to deliver on core strategies.

Risk teams can help organisations identify and navigate existing and emerging risks while considering what different customers might want depending on the service being offered. However, they can’t do this in a silo. Cross-team collaboration is vital. It’s important that risk management becomes a business-wide consideration.

To do this, it’s first important to understand the challenges facing risk teams. There are many, but the three core challenges facing teams right now are:

1. Regulation – Increasingly, responding to how our strategies and use of technology may be affected by impending regulation requires close collaboration between multiple teams: risk, legal, compliance, product, sales, and technology, to name but a few. In addition, whilst the regulatory world we have to navigate is increasingly complex, it is also clear that in some areas regulation is falling behind and governments are scrambling to keep up. The largely domestic or pan-European approach of legislators to cyber and data risks is a good example of where legislation is struggling with the often-international reach of the threat.
2. Customer expectation – Understanding customer expectations within the sector you are in is key. Planning to mitigate risk without inadvertently adding barriers to the customer experience is vital. Now, two-thirds (66%) of customers expect companies to understand their needs and will spend more for a good experience.
3. Enterprise-wide risk and cross-team collaboration - The pace of change is unprecedented. Risks are increasingly enterprise-wide, requiring cross-team collaboration and cooperation to address. Using technology as an example, it is now used in almost every aspect of business. With risks in this space ranging from one single employee’s actions, to being caught up as collateral damage from cyber-attacks like NotPetya, the narrative of responsibility sitting purely with one team in the business, or one team of risk professionals, is outdated.

Bringing professionals together

To strike the right balance, risk professionals need to take the lead in ensuring that risk management is more of a collective cross-business function and no longer limited to a discipline or one vertical. It is essential that risk management functions collaborate cross-discipline and cross-business, as opposed to the more traditional method of each function focusing on their speciality areas.

This enables teams to work with other functions of the business, such as customer experience teams, to work out the level of risk appetite and the best way of keeping the business assets safe while ensuring that the experience doesn’t suffer.

Within our industry in the data centre world, our customers often expect and demand certain risk approaches around the physical security of their equipment. This has to be factored into any risk strategy around access protocols and protections of our campuses and buildings. However, our customers still want to access their equipment so risk and business teams must work together to ensure effective and fit-for-purpose risk management

The evolving landscape

The risk landscape is changing at speed and digital acceleration is evolving at an unprecedented pace. As a result, our technology systems and the data within them are becoming more valuable by the day, as organisations move online and digital services become the norm. Regardless of sector, businesses are increasingly facing sophisticated cyber and data-related risks so the whole organisation must now play their part in risk management, with professionals in all departments needing to be educated and engaged.

Risk teams can help organisations identify and navigate existing and emerging risks while considering what different customers might want depending on the service being offered. However, they can’t do this in a silo. Cross-team collaboration is vital. Our risk teams can help bring these teams together to navigate this increasingly challenging threat landscape, and to do that risk professionals need to be interested, curious, ask questions and keep up with the changing world around them.

Sarah Draper joined Telehouse Europe as General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer early in 2022. Qualifying as a lawyer in 1998, Sarah has worked on some of the largest transactions across Central Government and the private sector during her career. Sarah has led on risk throughout and most recently held the Interim Director of Internal Audit and Risk Management for Royal Mail Plc, now International Distributions Services plc. Sarah most recently ended her almost ten-year tenure at Royal Mail in late 2021, during which time the company went through an initial public offering, launched one of the largest IT transformation programs in Europe and commenced an acquisition journey that saw the Group expand across Europe, Canada and the US.