Overcoming common risk treatment challenges

According to a recent PwC Pulse Survey, 75% of organizations say they’re struggling to improve their risk management processes as they face a growing wave of cyber threats, regulatory changes, and operational complexity.

Managing risk effectively isn’t just about understanding threats. It’s about making smart, timely decisions about how you’ll respond to them to keep your business secure and resilient. This is why risk treatment is such a critical part of the puzzle. It’s where strategy meets execution: the part of your risk management plan that defines exactly what you’ll do about the risks you’ve identified.

From everyday decisions about access controls to long-term plans for data protection or third-party relationships, risk treatment shapes how your business operates, how secure it is, and how prepared it will be for what comes next.

In this article, we’ll break down what risk treatment really means, walk through common strategies, and show you how to create a practical, effective risk treatment plan that supports your broader business and security goals.

What is risk treatment?

No organization is completely free from risk. Risk treatment is the process of deciding how you're going to address the risk your organization faces, and it’s an essential part of a strong risk management strategy. Risk treatment isn’t necessarily about eliminating risk altogether, but rather managing it in a way that aligns with your business goals and supports strategic decision-making if it can’t be resolved.

Once you’ve identified and assessed your risks, the next step is selecting the right treatment approach for each risk based on its severity, potential impact, and the resources available to you. Your risk treatment decisions directly influence your security posture, day-to-day operations, and long-term resilience.

There are five main risk treatment strategies. Each one serves a different purpose, and most organizations use a combination of them to effectively address threats across their environment.

Risk avoidance

This one’s simple: you don’t do the thing that causes the risk. If the risk of taking an action outweighs the benefits, it may be better to just not do it. For example, if storing credit card data internally creates compliance headaches and information security challenges, you might choose to use a third-party payment processor instead.

Risk reduction

Risk reduction is about lowering the likelihood or impact of a risk. This is the most common strategy in cybersecurity. Think patching vulnerabilities, implementing multi-factor authentication, and training employees to recognize phishing attempts as ways to reduce the chances of a cyber incident.

Risk mitigation

Risk mitigation is sometimes confused with both risk treatment and risk reduction, but it’s not exactly the same. Mitigation is just one type of risk treatment, and it involves the steps you take to reduce the impact of a risk.

Risk reduction typically refers to reducing the likelihood of a risk occurring, while mitigation is about the steps you take to minimize the impact of a risk if it materializes. For instance, having a business continuity or disaster recovery plan doesn’t prevent a disruption, but it helps mitigate the damage if one occurs.

Risk transfer

Transferring risk means handing off the financial or operational consequences to someone else. Purchasing insurance is a classic example. Outsourcing certain business functions to a service provider, like cloud storage or payment processing, is another. Just be careful: you can transfer responsibility, but you can't outsource accountability.

Risk acceptance

Sometimes, the best (and most cost-effective) response is to accept the risk. Maybe the risk is low-impact, or maybe the cost of treatment is too high. Or perhaps your risk reduction and risk mitigation strategies have brought the risk down to an acceptable level.

Examples of risk treatment

Let’s take driving a car as an example to better understand risk treatment and how the different strategies work.

Say you need to get to the grocery store, and it’s too far to walk. But if you drive, there’s a chance you could get into a car accident. So what are your options?

You could avoid the risk by paying extra to have your groceries delivered.

You could reduce the likelihood and mitigate the impact of an accident by making sure your vehicle is safe and well maintained, following the rules of the road, and wearing your seatbelt.

You could transfer some of the risk by paying for comprehensive car insurance that would help pay for any damage or medical bills as the result of an accident.

You could accept the risk as within your tolerance level. Or you can decide that the remaining risk is too high and order in.

Of course in the world of cybersecurity, risk treatment looks a little bit different. Here are a few real-world scenarios for common risks:

• Risk reduction: A company encrypts sensitive customer data to hedge the risk of a data breach.
• Risk mitigation: An organization implements an incident response plan to limit the impact of a security incident.
• Risk transfer: A small business buys a cyber liability policy from an insurance company to cover potential losses from a ransomware attack.
• Risk avoidance: An organization decides not to launch a certain feature because it would expose them to new risks of non-compliance and potential regulatory scrutiny.
• Risk acceptance: A minor software bug only affects a small percentage of users and poses no security threat, so it’s considered an accepted risk.

How to build an effective risk treatment plan

Identifying risks is only half the battle. Where many organizations struggle is in developing a structured, repeatable process for addressing them. Without a clear plan, risk decisions often default to reactive, ad hoc responses — or worse, doing nothing at all.

A risk treatment plan gives you a consistent framework for evaluating risks, selecting the right treatment strategies, assigning ownership, and tracking progress. More importantly, it ensures that risk decisions are grounded in you organization’s goals, risk appetite, and resource realities.

Let’s walk through the key steps of building a risk treatment plan that’s both practical and aligned with your organization’s strategic priorities.

Step 1: Risk appetite

Start by establishing how much risk your organization is willing to tolerate in pursuit of its strategic objectives. This is your risk appetite, and it serves as the lens through which all risk treatment decisions should be made.

Risk appetite varies widely between organizations and largely depends on your industry, goals, and resources. For example, a healthcare organization handling patient data will likely have a low risk appetite when it comes to cybersecurity. A startup experimenting with new tech might be more comfortable taking bigger risks.

Step 2: Risk identification

Next you need to understand your specific risk landscape. What is your organization’s overall risk profile? What are the key threats and vulnerabilities facing your business? Where are your greatest risk exposures?

Your risk treatment plan should address a range of risk types, including:

• Reputational risk: If a data breach hits the news, your brand takes a hit. Reputation is hard to rebuild, so reputational risk is a serious consideration.
• Financial risk: This includes direct costs like ransomware payouts as well as indirect ones like downtime, fines, and lost business.
• Cybersecurity risk: Think malware, phishing, insider threats, misconfigured systems — anything that threatens the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of your data and systems.
• Compliance risk: Failing to meet regulatory or contractual requirements (like, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or GDPR) can lead to fines and legal action.
• Operational risk: System failures, third-party outages, human error, and other risks that  impact your ability to deliver services and keep the lights on.
• Strategic risk: These types of risks are associated with or created by a company’s business strategy or business objectives and changes to technology, personnel, or events that could impact the defined strategy and objectives.

Step 3: Risk assessment

Risk assessment involves evaluating each risk based on its likelihood and impact to determine which ones need the most immediate attention. Look at each system, process, vendor, and information asset to identify threats and vulnerabilities. What are the most critical assets? Who has access to them? What existing controls are already in place?

Most organizations use a risk register or risk matrix to catalog and prioritize risks. How likely is it that each risk will actually happen? And if it does, how bad would it be? High-likelihood, high-impact risks go to the top of the list. Low-likelihood, low-impact threats may just need to be monitored.

Step 4: Risk response and treatment

Once you’ve identified potential risks, you need to decide an action plan for each one. This is when you apply your risk treatment strategies based on each risk’s severity, your risk appetite, and the resources available.

Ask yourself:

• Can I eliminate the risk by avoiding the activity?
• Can I reasonably reduce the risk to an acceptable level with risk controls?
• Is there a reliable third party I can transfer the risk to?
• Is the cost of treating the risk greater than the potential impact?
• Would accepting this risk push us out of compliance or create a significant exposure?

Choosing the right treatment strategy is ultimately a balancing act between pursuing your strategic goals while weighing the risks — and it’s why having a clearly defined risk appetite to guide your decision making is so important.

Step 5: Residual risk

In many cases, you won’t be able to completely eliminate the risk. Any risk remaining after treatment is called residual risk.

Assessing residual risk helps leadership understand your organization’s actual risk exposure and whether additional controls are necessary. If residual risk still exceeds your risk appetite, revisit your treatment strategy or consider layering in additional safeguards.

Step 6: Risk treatment plan documentation

A risk treatment plan (RTP) is where you document everything you’ve done and put your strategy into practice. It lists which risks you're treating, the specific steps you’re taking to treat them, who’s responsible for each action, and how you'll track progress.

At a minimum, your risk treatment plan should include the following:

• Risk ID: Unique identifier (can be as simple as “R-001”)
• Risk description: Clear explanation of what the risk is
• Likelihood & impact: Based on your assessment (e.g., high, medium, or low)
• Risk rating: Usually calculated by combining likelihood and impact
• Treatment strategy: Avoid, Reduce, Transfer, Accept, or Share
• Mitigation actions: Specific controls or activities you’ll implement
• Applicable controls: The specific security, compliance, or technical controls that apply to this risk. Linking risks to applicable controls ensures traceability, supports audit readiness, and helps you verify that the chosen mitigation actions effectively reduce the risk.
• Owner: Who owns the risk or implementation
• Target date: When treatment should be completed
• Residual risk: The remaining risk after mitigation is applied
• Status: Open, In Progress, Complete, or Reviewed

If your organization is working toward ISO 27001 certification (or just using it as a best practice framework), you’ll also need to map identified risks to Annex A controls and include justification for each treatment choice. Document evidence that controls are in place and your risk treatment plan is being regularly reviewed and updated.

The biggest challenges of risk treatment and how to overcome them

Even with a strong framework in place, many organizations struggle to treat risk effectively. From competing priorities to unclear direction, it’s easy for progress to stall. Below are some of the most common roadblocks cybersecurity and IT teams face, along with some practical tips to overcome them.

Prioritization paralysis

When everything feels like a priority, it's hard to know where to begin. Teams that identify dozens (or hundreds) of risks can quickly fall into prioritization paralysis, where nothing gets addressed efficiently.

Use a simple risk matrix to score each risk based on likelihood and impact. Focus on the top-right quadrant first (high likelihood + high impact). This gives you a rational, defensible way to concentrate efforts where they’ll matter most.

Lack of clear risk appetite

If leadership hasn’t clearly defined acceptable levels of risk, treatment decisions devolve into guesswork or are inconsistent across teams.

Encourage cross-functional conversations to define risk appetite by category (e.g., cybersecurity, financial, compliance). Use real-world examples or past incidents to help leadership set realistic thresholds for risk acceptance and treatment.

Limited resources

Resource constraints are one of the most common barriers to effective risk treatment. Without sufficient staff or budget, even known high-priority risks can linger unresolved.

Focus on high-impact, low-effort controls for quick wins, and look for ways to stretch your internal resources by automating repetitive tasks like evidence collection, control monitoring, and reporting. If possible, centralize risk tracking in a GRC tool or compliance management system so everyone can work from the same source of truth.

Siloed information

Risk data often lives across different teams, tools, and spreadsheets. As a result, risks aren’t consistently tracked or evaluated, and communication between stakeholders can break down.

Keeping a centralized risk register can give you a single source of truth. When engaging with other departments and stakeholders, translate technical risks into tangible business impact — for example, how a misconfigured firewall could lead to downtime, compliance violations, or reputational damage. This improves alignment and decision-making.

Changing threat landscape

New vulnerabilities, tools, and attack vectors emerge constantly, meaning the risk treatment plan you built six months ago may already be outdated.

Build scheduled risk reviews into your ongoing risk management processes (e.g., quarterly or after major system changes), and use automated scanning and monitoring tools to surface emerging issues like misconfigurations, shadow IT, or outdated software that may require treatment.

Inadequate residual risk calculations

Many organizations stop at the control implementation stage, without assessing what risk still remains. That leaves leadership blind to whether the risk has been reduced sufficiently or if more controls are needed.

Develop a consistent approach for estimating residual risk, ideally using the same likelihood and impact scale from your initial risk analysis. Document these estimates and include them in your treatment plan so leadership sees the full picture.

Difficulty mapping risks to compliance frameworks

It’s not always clear how to map identified risks to frameworks like ISO 27001, especially when risk management is a separate function from compliance.

Use tools or templates that map common risks to specific controls in your target security framework. This ensures your treatment plan supports both a strong security posture and audit readiness without duplicating your efforts.

Over-reliance on manual processes

Tracking risks in static spreadsheets or disconnected systems can be time-consuming, and inconsistent, and quickly fall out of date.

Adopt an automation platform that allows you to automate routine risk management tasks, assign ownership, track progress, and generate reports. This not only reduces manual effort but also increases consistency and visibility across the organization.

The benefits of automating your risk assessment and treatment workflows

Risk treatment isn’t a checkbox activity; it’s a critical process that directly impacts your security posture, operational resilience, and ability to meet compliance requirements. But doing it well takes time, consistency, and clarity at every step.

That’s where Secureframe can help.

Our platform uses AI to streamline the entire risk assessment and treatment workflow. From identifying risks to selecting the right treatment strategy, Secureframe automates the heavy lifting so your team can focus on strategic decision-making, not spreadsheets.

Our AI powered risk assessment workflows analyze your environment to generate inherent risk scores, proposed risk treatment strategies, and residual risk scores so you have clear visibility into remaining exposure. Our features also automate justifications and mappings to dozens of frameworks, including ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST frameworks, and more.

Whether you're managing internal risk or preparing for a security audit, Secureframe makes it easy to maintain a centralized and up-to-date risk treatment plan, all while helping you stay continuously compliant.

If you're ready to scale your risk management program with less manual effort, request a demo to see Secureframe in action.