With the average cost of a data breach now hovering around the $4 million mark, there’s not a business model around ready to absorb that hit.

No matter what industry you’re in, hacks are going to happen. The only thing you can do is to prepare for the coming storm with a technology risk management plan.

Here are four ways to protect yourself from technology risks that arise in any industry and can affect any successful company.

1. Protect Your Business First

When you’re putting together a plan for risk management, you need to separate out the elements that make up your company.

There is saved customer data that’s private, vital, and crippling if it ever gets out. There is also the information that’s shared between your employees, which makes doing work easier.

However, there are critical elements that, if removed, would disable your entire business model completely. If you don’t understand what those are, you need to take a second look at your whole data organizing system.

Work with your IT staff to separate the elements of your system that are essential to bringing money in.

Your employee health insurance data is important but accessible in other places. The algorithms that are stored on laptops to make work easier are also important but don’t have a direct correlation with money coming through the door.

When you’re worried about information security, the kinds of problems around data leaks vary.

Having a hacker get ahold of your private emails and leaking internal conversations about your coworkers or people who work on your team is tough. But it’s nowhere near as bad as having your hard work given away as in what happened with the Sony hack.

2. Coordinate Everyone

Across all of the elements involved in your business, you’ve got different types of technology risks.

If you’re thinking about things in the physical sense, you need to worry about climate change, server locations, and backups. If you’re worried about information leaking through vendors, you need a layer of security between your company and theirs.

When considering where to house your backups, consider someplace off-site, with a data management company on top of your information. Get dedicated servers in more than one location so that if anything happens to your backup or your on-site system, you’ve got an emergency backup.

Climate change is real, and we need to think about it in the context of technology. If we don’t have our ducks in a row, an earthquake would not only wreck our office but take our whole business down.

At the same time, you need another team dedicated to ensuring that a leak somewhere else doesn’t trickle down to you. If one of your vendors gets hacked, you need to protect your financial information. If they’re hacked and that hack ends up opening up your servers, your customers are going to be in trouble.

The way that these problems pass from one party to the next is alarming and requires us to be on our toes.

3. Reconsider What Performance Means

The incentives that you offer your IT managers to incentivize good performance need to make sense.

While many companies incentivize delivery time and budget-conscious decisionmaking, that can’t drive you. When your managers are driven to cut corners and slash costs to make you happy, they’re going to leave you open to an attack.

Building strong security measures takes time and costs money. If you’re not ready to spend that money, make sure you’ve got a rainy day fund for a data breach.

Technology risk management is too serious to worry about money.

Short-term delivery ignores the value of long-term results. Long-term risks are much more significant when a system has a weak boundary between customer-facing processes and a database.

Look at forwarding-thinking measurements. Rather than planning to block every attack that comes your way, put into place a figure that measures how long it takes to find a cyber incident. Then measure how well that’s mitigated by how many unknown devices are on your network for how long.

Most of the failures of IT risk management arise from budget or scheduling problems. When you fail to align your business model with one that doesn’t look at the check when it comes to security spending, you fail to protect yourself.

4. Spend on Talent

When it comes to where you spend your money, you need to be spending it on hiring the best talent around. Technology risk management requires you to have people on hand who have the critical thinking skills to handle problems as they arise.

Developing talent doesn’t require you to spend millions on an army of full-time staffers.

Many companies use part-time staffing models and rotations to find the people who make their company stronger. Some companies put effort into recruiting, but that’s not always necessary.

If you don’t have the skills to know when someone is coming to you with all of the cybersecurity goods, hire a staffing group to help you out. Companies like The Scarlett Group can help advise on the type of talent you need to win the cyber war.

With the right people on hand, you’ll keep intruders out and keep your business running with your customer base unaware of any issues that arise.

Technology Risk Management Isn’t That Hard

While there’s lots of planning and mitigation that goes into technology risk management, once you’ve installed your system, you can rest easy.

Technology risk management is a constantly shifting field, but with the right people in place, you’ll be prepared for anything. Hire diligent and creative staff, and you’ll be protected no matter what.

For more ways in which technology is there to help your business, check out our latest guide.