Developing a Risk Management Plan for a Fictitious Organization

Purpose

Purpose

This project provides an opportunity to apply the competencies gained in the lessons of this course to develop a risk management plan for a fictitious organization to replace its outdated plan.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

You will gain an overall understanding of risk management, its importance, and critical processes required when developing a formal risk management plan for an organization.

The following tools and resources that will be needed to complete this project:

• Course textbook
• Internet access for research

As discussed in this course, risk management is an important process for all organizations. This is particularly true in information systems, which provides critical support for organizational missions. The heart of risk management is a formal risk management plan. The project activities described in this document allow you to fulfill the role of an employee participating in the risk management process in a specific business situation.

The project is structured as follows:

All project submissions should follow this format:

• Format: Microsoft Word or compatible
• Font: Arial, 10-point, double-space
• Citation Style: Your school’s preferred style guide

You are an information technology (IT) intern working for Health Network, Inc. (Health Network), a fictitious health services organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Health Network has over 600 employees throughout the organization and generates $500 million USD in annual revenue. The company has two additional locations in Portland, Oregon and Arlington, Virginia, which support a mix of corporate operations. Each corporate facility is located near a co-location data center, where production systems are located and managed by third-party data center hosting vendors.

Company Products

Health Network has three main products: HNetExchange, HNetPay, and HNetConnect.

HNetExchange is the primary source of revenue for the company. The service handles secure electronic medical messages that originate from its customers, such as large hospitals, which are then routed to receiving customers such as clinics.

HNetPay is a Web portal used by many of the company’s HNetExchange customers to support the management of secure payments and billing. The HNetPay Web portal, hosted at Health Network production sites, accepts various forms of payments and interacts with credit-card processing organizations much like a Web commerce shopping cart.

HNetConnect is an online directory that lists doctors, clinics, and other medical facilities to allow Health Network customers to find the right type of care at the right locations. It contains doctors’ personal information, work addresses, medical certifications, and types of services that the doctors and clinics offer. Doctors are given credentials and are able to update the information in their profile. Health Network customers, which are the hospitals and clinics, connect to all three of the company’s products using HTTPS connections. Doctors and potential patients are able to make payments and update their profiles using Internet-accessible HTTPS Web sites.

NOTE:  Any discussion of products not a part of this scenario, such as health insurance products, will result in an automatic 50% reduction in points. Your paper  is not a research paper on risk management – it is a risk management plan to a very specific situation and must relate to the scenario, above.

Health Network operates in three production data centers that provide high availability across the company’s products. The data centers host about 1,000 production servers, and Health Network maintains 650 corporate laptops and company-issued mobile devices for its employees.

Threats Identified

• Loss of company data due to hardware being removed from production systems
• Loss of company information on lost or stolen company-owned assets, such as mobile devices and laptops
• Loss of customers due to production outages caused by various events, such as natural disasters, change management, unstable software, and so on
• Internet threats due to company products being accessible on the Internet
• Insider threats
• Changes in regulatory landscape that may impact operations

Senior management at Health Network has determined that the existing risk management plan for the organization is out of date and a new risk management plan must be developed. Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, senior management is committed to and supportive of the project to develop a new plan. You have been assigned to develop this new plan.

Additional threats other than those described previously may be discovered when re-evaluating the current threat landscape during the risk assessment phase.

The budget for this project has not been defined due to senior management’s desire to react to any and all material risks that are identified within the new plan. Given the company’s annual revenue, reasonable expectations can be determined.

For the first part of the assigned project, you must create an initial draft of the final risk management plan. To do so, you must:

1. A section titled Introduction discussing the purpose of the plan. You must include details from the scenario, above, describing the environment.  10 points.
2. A section titled Scopediscussing the scope of the plan. 10 points
3. A section, titled Compliance Laws and Regulations.  Using the information in the scenario provided above, discuss regulations and laws with which Health Network must comply. 30 points
4. A section, titled Roles and Responsibilities, that will discuss the different individuals and departments who will be responsible for risk management within the organization (this was presented in your textbook). 20 points
5. A section, titled Risk Mitigation Plan, that discusses the threats identified in the scenario and your proposed mitigations, as well as any new threats.30 points.

Write an initial draft of the risk management plan as detailed in the instructions above. Your plan should be made using a standard word processor format compatible with Microsoft Word.

• Did the student demonstrate an understanding of the competencies covered in the course thus far?
• Did the student include all important components of a risk management plan in the outline?
• Did the student demonstrate good research, reasoning, and decision-making skills in identifying key components and compliance laws and regulations?
• Did the student create a professional, well-developed draft with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation?