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Information Systems Risk Management

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CMGT/441 - INFORMATION SYSTEMS RISK MANAGEMENT

Week-4 assignment

Wonyie V. Zarwee

November 29, 2010

While it lessens the burden on organizations, reducing and shifting the cost and risk of its IT operation, security and management issues to an external service provider or vendor, outsourcing any portions of an organization's Information System has significant risks that can sometimes become detrimental to the outsourced organization. According to the Commission on Government Outsourcing, "when outsourcing an organization exposes itself to significant risks in terms of security, accuracy, and completeness of information (Holroyd City Council, 2008)". Comprised in the rest of this document is an exclusive examination of four different outsourcing activities and the associated risks that an organization needs to be aware of.
Let me begin with the use of an external service provider for data storage for an organization. This situation is mostly attributed to midsized and few large business with less capital to develop and operate a databases of their own. They may neither have the finance to purchase and operate a database adequately nor the additional funding to hire a skilled IT team to manage a database in-house. In an attempt to effectively and securely manage their data at a lower and affordable budget, many of these organizations choose to outsource their data storage. Even though outsourcing of their database helps an organization to save on cost, there are many risk involve with outsourcing data to external service providers.
Among the risks associated with outsourcing an organization's data is vulnerability of data. An organization's outsourced data faces several risks. Some of these includes unauthorized viewing of the outsourced confidential business information, theft and illegal sharing of confidential business

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