Risk Assessment Matrix (Research Paper Sample)

Introduction
Businesses face uncertainties all through their lifecycles. From cyber-attacks, natural disasters like floods and tornadoes, and even human errors, it is critical for business leaders to invest in some form of systems that manages and addresses these issues. Over the last two years, it has been evident that unforeseen events like pandemics can end up 
having catastrophic consequences to businesses. The question that many business leaders have to confront is how they can continue their operations even after some of these consequential occurrences. This is where business continuity planning comes in. For businesses that rely on information technology infrastructure, the IT administrators hold the critical responsibility of creating such a plan as they are in a better position to understand the possible risks and threats that the business faces, but it is for the managers and executive staff to participate actively in the process, avail the necessary resources, and provide the overall knowledge about the company, among other things.
This report will focus on business continuity planning in the ecommerce sector. Some of the risks that the ecommerce sector faces include online security, system reliability, privacy concerns, credit card fraud, intellectual property concerns, and customer disputes. Risks of unauthorized accesses, exploitation of system vulnerabilities, platform downtimes, non-compliance, and human error. The Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report revealed that nearly one in every three cybersecurity breaches tend to involve small businesses. Cyber-attacks are some of the most devastating to ecommerce companies and firms have continued to invest in this sector. The pandemic served an important role in shaping the ecommerce niche. It opened up the potential of the sector as many people were forced to order things online due to the restrictions imposed in the country and globally. While so, the threats like attacks and others only increased.
This business continuity plan is for Martwall, a leading retail ecommerce company in the United States. As the CTO, I will evaluate aspects of the business continuity process like risk assessment, critical examination of the business functions, and company organizational overview, among others. As the CTO, I am responsible for the information security systems of the company and hence I am obligated to ensure that the systems are secure against the ever-changing nature of the threat landscape.
The adopted mechanism of addressing the identified risks is system patching. System patching, and doing so in a continuous manner, will help address the many arising system issues. As such, the company will be able to assure, to a significant degree of accuracy, business continuity.
Risk Assessment Matrix
Risk Assessment Matrix Evaluation:
One of the biggest threats and risks that ecommerce companies face is credit card fraud. This threat is a form of identity theft that entails an unauthorized party taking of another’s credit card information and using them to charge purchases on the internet, or even removing funds from them. specifically, in the context of ecommerce, it entails the fraudster using the stolen credit card information to make purchases of products or services from web merchants. More than 92% of all online transactions involves a credit card and this underscores the severity of credit card fraud if it were to happen to companies. In 2018, more than $24 billion were lost globally due to fraudulent card transactions, and this threat has only been growing (Georgiev, 2022). An estimated $6.7 billion in ecommerce revenues were lost to chargebacks in 2016 (Shukairy, 2016). Fraud instances increased by 140% from 2020 and it is estimated that every $1 of fraud costs U.S. retail and ecommerce merchants up to $3.75 which is about 20% higher than the pre-pandemic rates.