What is a Risk Register (+ How to Create One)

In 2023, American companies broke a new record for the number of incidents in which user data was compromised. The Identity Theft Resource Center reports over 3,200 breaches that year that affected over 350 million customers. 

Many organizations know they need to take the risk of a breach seriously, but they may not be aware of common threats their industry faces and how to handle them. Having a risk register ensures your organization has a plan of action for staying ahead of potentially costly threats. 

In this post, we’ll cover what a risk register is, how to create and use one, and helpful examples to help you understand how your organization can stay vigilant against threats. 

What Is a Risk Register?

A risk register is a log that lists all the potential risks that could impact your organization and how you plan to respond. The purpose of a risk register is to help you get a complete picture of your threat landscape to ensure your organization has risk management processes in place.

Your risk register may include risks that could affect your business, like cyberattacks and negative publicity, or risks associated with your adherence to compliance frameworks or other industry regulations.

Why Do You Need a Risk Register?

A risk register is necessary because it allows you to stay ahead of potential threats before they occur. By identifying potential risks, your team can create a plan of action to implement should the incident ever happen.

Simply put, a risk register makes it easier to: 

• Identify and track risks that might derail your organization.
• Decide which risks are worth acting on (and which ones aren’t).
• Proactively plan how to address the biggest risks to help your team. 
• Implement mitigation plans to reduce the risk to an acceptable level.

Leaders and cybersecurity professionals within your organization will typically use the risk register as a reference to identify and prioritize cybersecurity threats and move toward proactive security. 

If your organization is required to keep a record of risk management activities, your risk register can help create an audit trail. Ultimately, a risk register is crucial for any organization, especially those required to meet regulatory compliance obligations. 

With Drata’s Risk Library, the Superhuman team identified a significant amount of additional risks, providing a more comprehensive understanding of potential vulnerabilities and enabling more effective mitigation strategies.

What Do You Include in a Risk Register?

What is a Risk Register?

A risk register is a log that lists all the potential risks that could impact your organization and how you plan to respond. The purpose of a risk register is to help you get a complete picture of your threat landscape to ensure your organization has risk management processes in place.

Your risk register may include risks that could affect your business, like cyberattacks and negative publicity, or risks associated with your adherence to compliance frameworks or other industry regulations.

Your risk register holds a foundational role in your company’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) efforts. An effective risk management strategy requires accurate and complete data: Stakeholders cannot make the best decisions regarding mitigation and risk response without a complete picture of the company’s risk landscape. Additionally, those in charge of making decisions regarding governance and compliance issues need to be aware of potential issues that might stem from their choices. 

A completed risk register also aids your organization in its risk mitigation efforts. While creating this risk log, you will ask various stakeholders across the company to reflect on circumstances that could disrupt their day-to-day and make plans to prevent and mitigate risk events. Anyone who participates in this process will have a greater understanding of what they can do now to prevent adverse circumstances and what steps they’ll need to take should one of the documented risks occur. 

Why Do You Need a Risk Register?

A risk register is necessary because it allows you to stay ahead of potential threats before they occur. Companies that proactively manage their risks won’t be caught by surprise when something goes wrong—they’ll know how to respond to minimize the impact.

Startups with small teams often manage risks informally, but this approach doesn’t scale as you increase the number of partnerships and dependencies within your company. Risks that only exist as hypotheticals within an employee’s or team’s mind are essentially invisible to the rest of the company, which means risk events might catch people unprepared. 

The larger your company, the more likely this is to happen. Additionally, a lack of documentation may obscure or confuse ownership over risks (and risk response efforts). Unprepared companies may even struggle to pass audits or stay in compliance with any necessary rules and regulations. 

There are external benefits to a risk register, too. You can use it to prove due diligence to partners and customers. Or, if you’re in an industry where audits are the norm, you may need it to create a paper trail for compliance and/or risk management initiatives. Organizations with higher regulatory or compliance burdens receive greater benefits from a risk register.

Simply put, a risk register makes it easier to: 

• Identify and track risks that might derail your organization.
• Decide which risks are worth acting on (and which ones aren’t).
• Proactively plan how to address the biggest risks to help your team. 
• Implement mitigation plans to reduce the risk to an acceptable level.

The strategic benefits only increase as companies grow. Your risk register becomes a bridge between different departments (like compliance, engineering, IT, and legal) and keeps everyone on the same page regarding risk management. 

Risk Register vs. Risk Matrix: What’s the Difference?

Discussions about risk assessment often include risk registers and risk matrices, but the two are not the same:

• A risk register is a detailed list or database that lays out potential risks your company might face, assigns them an owner, and includes notes on mitigation actions. 
• A risk matrix, on the other hand, visualizes the impact and likelihood of risks. A risk matrix is usually a color-coded 5x5 grid. 

Risk registers and risk matrices aren’t an “either-or” solution. The two work best when they’re used together. As you’re identifying potential risks to include in your risk register, chart them onto a risk matrix. The visualizations will help everyone involved see which risks the company should prioritize. Then, use the register to guide your mitigation efforts. 

What Do You Include in a Risk Register?

A risk register should include a description of each risk and the probability and impact it could have. In addition, your risk register should always include the following components:   

• Risk identification: This includes the risk name or identification number. These identification numbers help organize your company’s risks into different categories so they are easier to locate and track.  
• Risk description: This is a brief description of the risk and why it’s an issue. 
• Risk category: Categorizing your risks can help your team identify the risk within the risk register, making it easier to understand who will be responsible for mitigation. For example, you may categorize your risk register by departments—like HR, operations, or IT risks.  
• Risk ownership: This includes the person or persons who will be responsible for managing and overseeing the risk response. 
• Risk probability: This gauges how likely the risk is to occur. You can categorize each risk as highly unlikely, unlikely, likely, or very likely. You can also use a numerical scale, with one being highly unlikely and four being highly likely, for example. 
• Risk impact: This highlights and measures the potential impact of the risk, helping your team understand which risks take precedence. When rating the potential impact, use a simple scale that includes ratings like extremely low, low, medium, high, and extremely high.  
• Risk priority: This takes risk probability and risk analysis into account to measure the priority level of the risk. Again, a simple number scale will work—one means extremely low, two means low, three means medium, four means high, and five means extremely high. 
• Risk response: Your response or mitigation plan will detail how you plan to handle the risk. This is a key component of a risk register, so your solution should be clearly outlined. 
• Risk status: This field of your risk register includes the status of the risk—open, in progress, ongoing, or closed—to help determine whether or not the risk has been handled. 
• Notes: You can also include a notes section to include any additional notes or details that will help team members better understand the risk and mitigation plan. 

Common Risk Categories

Categorizing each risk on your register helps provide structure for the document or database. It can also guide your decision on who should own each risk, and which teams need to prepare for an eventual response.

Here are risk categories your register will likely include, their definitions, and types of risks that fit under each:

• Compliance risks are mistakes that could cause you to fall out of compliance with laws or regulations. For example, missing evidence, outdated policies, or audit gaps. 
• Environmental (physical) risks are circumstances that could threaten the integrity of your premises or property. For example, data center loss, extreme weather, or power failures.
• Financial risks are outcomes that could affect your company’s ability to meet its financial obligations and threaten your solvency. For example, customers’ failure to pay, rising interest rates, or increased costs of goods and services.
• Operational risks refer to events that could affect employees’ day-to-day work or company output. For example, system outages, change failures, or onboarding errors.
• Reputational risks cover incidents that impact your trust with customers, partners, or investors. For example, data breaches, public misbehavior of employees, or reports of poor service or products. 
• Strategic risks are Business decisions that could lead to unexpected consequences that impact your organization’s long-term outlook. For example, market entry, legal exposure, and acquisitions.
• Technical risks include problems that could impact the hardware or software your company relies on. For example, software vulnerabilities, outdated dependencies, or shadow IT.
• Vendor risks encompass events at partner businesses or organizations that could impact your ability to perform necessary tasks. For example, third-party service outages, non-compliant subprocessors, or vendor closure.

Your risks may not all fit into these categories, but this list provides most companies with a good starting place when building out their risk register. 

How to Create a Risk Register

It's important for your team to understand each step of the risk register creation process so they're well-versed in how to handle potential threats. Following a proper risk management framework is key. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework is a good guideline that follows five main areas of focus: identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. 

With that framework in mind, we’ve outlined seven steps to create a successful risk register for your organization. 

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1. Identify Areas at Risk

The first step in creating a risk register is identifying your organization’s potential risks. These may include risks or concerns identified in historical data, upcoming threats, or common risks in your industry. 

When identifying risks, start with the categories laid out in the previous section. Then, think about risks specific to your industry. For example:

• Finance: Fraud, payment system instability
• Healthcare: HIPAA violations, outdated access controls
• SaaS startups: Data leaks, credential mismanagement, third-party downtime

It’s also a good idea to use relevant external references, like those included with common risk assessment and risk management frameworks like NIST SP 800-30, ISO 27005, or SOC 2.

Include multiple teams, partners, and stakeholders in your risk identification process for the widest view of potential risks. The larger your business, the more people you should include in this process for the best results. At the very least, make sure you have an expert who can speak to each category you need to cover. 

For example, startups may loop in the CTO to cover technical risks and the CFO to speak to financial risks. Enterprise companies will need to add roles that don’t exist at smaller companies, like GRC leads, who will be able to identify cross-functional risks. 

2. Describe the Risks

Next, you’ll want to create a brief (one- to two-sentence) description of each risk. It should detail what the risk entails and why it’s a potential threat to your organization. List concrete consequences (delayed sales, cancellation of SLAs, loss of customer trust) so everyone can understand how critical each risk on your register might be.

Encourage all participants to use clear and nontechnical language so stakeholders can understand the details of risks that lie outside their areas of expertise. Final descriptions should skew toward high-level explanations of the system(s), process(es), and outcome(s) a risk event would impact rather than a technical blow-by-blow that non-experts would find confusing.

3. Rate the Risks

Ask yourself: How serious is each risk? At this stage, you’ll want to create a risk rating. The risk probability rating determines how likely the risk is to occur, and the risk analysis rating determines the potential impact that risk could have. 

Because each risk rating needs to be assessed by an individual with in-depth knowledge of the domain, provide a standardized scale and guidance on what constitutes an appropriate risk rating. Otherwise, contributors may impose their own assumptions on the rating process and skew your prioritization process.

Here’s how you might organize a numerical rating scale for risk probability: 

1. Highly unlikely 
2. Unlikely 
3. Likely 
4. Highly likely  

For your risk analysis, your numerical scale may look like this: 

1. Extremely low
2. Low
3. Medium
4. High
5. Extremely high

You might also consider other risk assessment methodologies to help you get a better understanding of the level of risk. While qualitative scoring is necessary to help compare risks across categories, some risks may be difficult to collapse into two numbers. And there may be situations where the reasoning behind each rating would be helpful, such as in board reports or stakeholder communications. Accordingly, you may want to ask raters to provide a short justification for the number they chose. (This will also help you see assumptions that may have affected their decision-making process.) 

Another important piece of context to ask for is your raters’ perceptions of the inherent versus residual risks for each item on the list. The inherent risk tied to each area identified is the amount of risk that exists (or would exist) if your company did not implement mitigations. The residual risk is the amount of risk that remains after you add controls to reduce the likelihood of an adverse outcome. 

Having both the inherent and residual risk scores for each list item can help in two ways. First, it’s likely your company has already taken measures to mitigate risks. Something that might be a five-alarm fire when uncontrolled is now a medium priority—you’ll want to update your controls someday, but there are more important risks to address first. Second, these scores will help you understand where to spend your time and effort. Some risks have few effective controls, which means you’ll want to prioritize risk mitigations that will make a bigger difference to your overall risk assessment.

4. Prioritize Your Risks

Once you have a clear picture of each risk’s likelihood and impact, you can start prioritizing your mitigation efforts and response planning. How will the risks on your list influence operations if they become an issue? 

A sound prioritization method considers: 

• How likely a risk is to occur.
• How much harm could result.
• The relative difference between inherent and residual risks. 

You might use a quadrant system to sort risks into categories (high likelihood and high impact, high likelihood and low impact, low likelihood and high impact, low likelihood and low impact). Or, consider a 6x6 grid that uses high/medium/low categorizations to make sure you’re focusing on the most important risks first. 

To account for the differences between inherent and residual risk, you might assign each item a red-amber-green (RAG) status that indicates whether any controls are in place. Color-coded heatmaps can also help you understand how effective mitigation efforts will be, allowing you to focus on high-impact areas. 

There’s a certain amount of personal judgment that goes into prioritization. Most organizations will start working on high-impact risks, beginning with the most likely and then moving toward the least likely, before moving on to medium—and then low—impact risks. However, you may determine it’s more important to put some controls in place for a high-likelihood, medium-impact risk before moving on to a high-impact risk that has a lower likelihood because your team has already done a fair amount of mitigation work.

Finally, it may seem obvious, but make sure everyone contributing to this project understands how your prioritized list should translate to their next steps. Awareness is only one part of a risk register. High-priority risks should be known, yes, but leaders must also start allocating resources to mitigation initiatives. The higher priority you’ve rated a risk, the more urgent these efforts should be.

5. Create a Response Plan

Perhaps the most important piece of a risk register is your response plan. This determines how you’ll respond to the risk: Will you choose to accept the risk, mitigate the risk, transfer the risk, or avoid the risk?

Accepting the risk means your company won’t take any actions to mitigate it. This may be the choice you make for risks if you deem mitigation and detailed response planning would take more resources than the risk would cost your company. Or, you might apply this response to risks you have little power to mitigate or those you deem extremely unlikely to occur.

No further steps are necessary when you choose to accept a risk. For example, perhaps a piece of software in your tech stack needs a patch, but if it’s updated, it won’t integrate properly with other tools. If it doesn’t touch any critical systems or information, you may accept the risk of the vulnerabilities because mitigation would be more costly than any issues that might arise from this risk.

Mitigating the risk means taking actions to decrease the likelihood it will occur and/or the severity of its effects on your company. You’ll probably do at least some mitigation for most of the risks you include on your register. 

Mitigation is, by necessity, the most resource-heavy option. Each risk requires a detailed mitigation plan, which will vary based on the details of the risk. It may include:

• Steps you’ll take to decrease the likelihood of occurrence: This will detail the preventative measures your company will put in place, including any ongoing efforts (regular audits) or practices (monthly assessment using risk management software).
• Steps you’ll take to decrease impact: There may be preventative measures you can take that will make a risk event less harmful to your company. For instance, if you decrease how highly your company is leveraged, you may be better situated to weather financial hardship. 
• Triggers for response actions: Unless you can reduce the likelihood of a risk to 0, create a contingency plan to refer to during a risk scenario. Document how individuals and/or the company should respond to potential risk events. A documented response plan may be required for compliance with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards.
• Success criteria or mitigation goals: What will individuals experience when your company has successfully mitigated the risk? This should go beyond “the risk event won’t occur” and list outcomes people will see in their day-to-day (and can thus measure against your criteria), such as “each new release undergoes automated testing, and major feature updates undergo performance testing before being released to customers.”
• Links to supplemental documents or artifacts: Relevant information, like regulatory requirements or in-depth incident plans, may not live in your risk register. Link any applicable information in your response plan to make it easily accessible. 

Keep in mind that risk mitigation plans are living documents. Risks may evolve, as may your company’s ability to counteract them. Creating and storing your response plan in a format that’s easy to access and update will help your mitigation efforts be as successful as possible.

Transferring the risk means contracting a third-party to handle the risk on your behalf. One common form of risk transference is insurance: Companies know lawsuits can be ruinous, so they purchase a professional liability insurance policy that will pay legal costs if they get sued.

If you choose to transfer a risk, you’ll need to find a third-party partner that is willing and able to fully take on the risk on your behalf. Once you’ve entered into a contract with them, you’ve done all you need to do. 

Avoiding the risk means taking steps to remove your company from being implicated in a potential adverse effect. Typically, this means refusing to take certain actions as a company.

Risk avoidance is an ongoing process. Once you’ve made the decision to avoid risk, you’ll need to enforce it. For example, any company that handles patients’ medical information is subject to HIPAA and can face steep fines for failing to comply. Your company could avoid that risk by refusing to contract with customers who work with medical information. Write this policy down and include enforcement mechanisms in your customer acquisition and contracting process to ensure you stay free of the risk.

Because this effort, like most others, will be shared across teams and contributors, it’s worth thinking about how much standardization you want among your risk response plans. One way to keep everyone working within the same template while centralizing all your risk response plans is to create them within a platform like Drata. It’s easy to create custom tasks for your response plan, and you can even set due dates and link them to project management tools like Jira. Centralizing your response plans will make sure nothing falls through the cracks, no matter how large your risk register is.

6. Assign a Risk Owner 

Designate a risk owner for each risk who will be responsible for managing and overseeing the identified risk. In practice, this means they are in charge of creating and updating the response plan, monitoring the status of your response initiatives, identifying and properly escalating changes to your plan, and making sure mitigation (and potential response efforts) adhere to the set timeline.

The owner of each risk should be someone with expertise in the category and a position from which they can allocate resources toward response efforts. For instance:

• Security risks might be owned by a lead security engineer or CISO.
• Compliance risks might be owned by your GRC lead.
• Operational risks might be owned by the head of your DevOps team or principal infrastructure engineer.

Each risk owner should be clear that risk management is now a part of their job. They’ll need to regularly review each risk and response plan and update relevant details of the risk register when anything changes.

For most risks, a quarterly review is sufficient—the only time you’ll need to check in more frequently is during a major business change (like onboarding a new vendor or introducing a new product). If you set up your risk response plans in Drata, it’s easy to trigger regular reminders in tools like Slack, so owners stay on top of each risk to which they’re assigned. 

7. Include Additional Notes

Lastly, your notes section contains additional information and context to help readers understand the risk and response plan. The notes section is also the place to add any information that might help when you’re reviewing your risk response plan and considering whether updates are necessary. 

Some examples of helpful notes include:

• Open questions: Are there any aspects of the risk register entry that may need to be updated pending additional information? For instance, after contacting a vendor to request its SOC 2 report, you may make a note that you’re waiting on the other party to close the loop, so you don’t forget to follow up if they don’t do so.
• Assumptions: We talked about how raters’ perceptions play a role when assigning risk ratings; contextual information on why a rating was chosen or a risk was prioritized for response can help other contributors better understand your company’s position.
• Updates: If you upgrade or downgrade a risk rating, add mitigations, adjust the response plan, or make other significant changes to a risk register entry, logging the changes and their reasons helps keep everyone on the same page.
• Audit flags: If you’re required to undergo audits that consider your certain risk assessment and mitigation practices, call out items the auditors should consider so they aren’t overlooked.
• Remediation or mitigation blockers: Creating a response plan isn’t the same thing as executing it. Sometimes you may find yourself stymied by outside considerations—for example, you know you’re using software that needs a patch, but you can’t update it to the latest version due to dependencies in your tech stack. 

As in the response plan, it’s a good idea to link artifacts like policy update memos, vulnerability tickets, or other documents related to your mitigation efforts. Having everything in one place makes it easier to see at a glance where your efforts stand. Platforms like Drata make it easy to bring everything together in one place. 

Keep in mind, notes aren’t just for your own use. They’re there to help others contextualize your decisions and responses, and see if and why mitigation efforts may still be pending. If a risk event happens when you’re not immediately available to respond, whoever steps in to coordinate the response needs to know this type of information. It is also useful during audits and can support your company’s diligence in post-incident reviews or SOC 2 evidence reviews.

Risk Register Examples

To help you create useful entries on your risk register, we’ve put together three industry-specific examples. Each one demonstrates what an entry on a risk register might look like.

Example 1: Finance

• Risk identification: Data breach
• Risk description: Unauthorized access to sensitive customer information and financial records leading to serious legal and financial damage and disrupting operations. 
• Risk category: Data Security  
• Risk ownership: Mike Smith 
• Risk probability: Likely 
• Risk impact: High 
• Risk priority: High 
• Risk response: Implement data encryption at rest and in transit, reinforce user authentication procedures, and develop an incident response plan to notify affected customers. 
• Risk status: Ongoing  
• Notes: Schedule regular security audits.  

Example 2: Software

• Risk identification: End-user engagement 
• Risk description: Poor user engagement during development leading to potentially dissatisfied customers and loss of revenue. 
• Risk category: User Experience  
• Risk ownership: Stacy Jones
• Risk probability: Likely 
• Risk impact: High
• Risk priority: High 
• Risk response: Conduct beta testing and run user surveys prior to launch to discover areas for improvement.  
• Risk status: Open
• Notes: Continue to monitor user feedback and make updates where necessary.

Example 3: Healthcare

• Risk identification: Staff shortage 
• Risk description: Staffing shortages due to employee turnover resulting in longer wait times for patients, a decrease in quality of care, and employee burnout.  
• Risk category: Human Resources 
• Risk ownership: Mike Smith 
• Risk probability: Likely 
• Risk impact: High  
• Risk priority: High 
• Risk response: Hire temporary staff to fill in and create a flexible scheduling system to maintain a healthy schedule with existing employees. Improve recruiting efforts by offering competitive pay and compensation packages to attract and retain employees. 
• Risk status: Ongoing  
• Notes: Provide all employees access to resources and tools to prevent burnout.  

Centralize and Streamline Your Risk Management Process with Drata

Drata helps you move faster with less risk. Our platform simplifies risk management through automation, identifying, assessing, and mitigating threats in real time:

• Tap into a pre-built library of 150+ risks aligned to frameworks like NIST and ISO 27005.
• Automatically map risks to controls and launch treatment plans without digging through spreadsheets.
• Manage ownership, documentation, and task tracking directly in the Risk Drawer.
• Push risk-related tasks into Jira and keep teams accountable.
• Visualize your risk posture with dashboards built for executives and stakeholders.
• Get alerts the moment new risks or threats emerge.

Risk doesn’t wait. Drata gives you the automation, visibility, and control to stay ahead and scale securely.

Centralize and Streamline Your Risk Management Process

Drata automatically matches risks with pre-mapped controls to unlock the power of automated tests and put risk management on autopilot, saving you time, money, and helping your business focus on more strategic objectives

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Frequently Asked Questions About Risk Registers

Still have questions about risk registers? We answer them below.

What is a Risk Register?

A risk register is a log or database of potential risks your company faces. It includes basic risk information and details on your company’s response plans. 

What is Recorded in a Risk Register?

A risk register should include risk identification, risk description, ratings of likelihood and impact, prioritization for mitigation efforts, risk response plans, a risk owner, and contextual notes to help third parties understand your risk posture.

What is a Risk Register as per ISO 9001?

ISO 9001 defines a risk register as a document that identifies risks and opportunities, analyzes risks, details your risk response, and lists residual risks (risks that remain even after mitigation efforts are in place).