Risk and Threat Assessments are useful for all types of businesses: manufacturing plants, law firms and software creators. Assessments also benefit organizations regardless of size. Whether a multinational corporation with headquarters in downtown New York City, or a small restaurant with a handful of employees in Kingston, Ontario, knowing the source of potential disaster is invaluable for any company wanting to ensure that their operation is not going to be affected by an unanticipated but potentially catastrophic event.
Some companies are required by charter, by the nature of the industry in which they operate, or by law, to have a Risk and Threat Assessment conducted. For organizations without obligation, deciding for or against the assessment usually comes down to how necessary the stakeholders believe it to be.
Most of the time, it takes a board member or executive to feel that the company is threatened in some way. Someone usually has to feel exposed to a threat agent before sponsoring a Risk and Threat Assessment. Often, this means learning from experience, identifying an apparent exposure, or hearing of disasters suffered by other, comparable organizations.
For example, Aboriginal protests in several parts of Canada in 2012 and 2013 have blocked major roads and railways, preventing people from getting to work. A company does not have to be directly affected by these protests for its stakeholders and executives to see they pose a potential threat. If perceived threat becomes a reality, the exposure may be enough to convince those with authority to solicit an assessment.
The Risk and Threat Assessment identifies:
- Threat agents – potential origins of disaster;
- The threat level of each agent – the relevancy of a threat to a particular business;
- Trends – how often a certain hazard has impacted the business in the past;
- Precedent – disasters that have befallen similar businesses, and businesses operating in the same geography.
For example, maybe an organization wants to understand the threat level protests pose to the railway or how it prevents its employees having access to their facility. During this investigation it may be discovered that the railway is regularly used to transport toxic waste, which poses an entirely new, unrealized prospective risk to the business. In identifying this risk, plus assessing the original threat, the company can prepare for both.
One of the greatest benefits of a Risk and Threat Assessment is that regardless of why it is commissioned, it can reveal all sorts of prospective dangers that were totally off the company’s radar.
