Basic Risk Terms
Explain impact, likelihood, mitigation, acceptance, owner, and review cadence.
Purpose
Risk work should be specific enough to influence decisions. A risk statement should describe the event, the cause or condition, the impact, the owner, and the next treatment decision.
Plain meaning
Basic Risk Terms is included as a practical term because teams often use it inconsistently. Before a workflow or policy can work, the people using it need the same operating definition.
How to use this term
- Use the term in decisions, not as decoration.
- Pair it with an owner, evidence source, or review trigger when possible.
- If people disagree about meaning, add a short local definition to the relevant template or policy.
When to use
- When the work repeats often enough that memory is no longer reliable.
- When more than one person may request, perform, review, or inherit the work.
- When risk, approval, evidence, or handoff needs to be visible later.
Common failure modes
- Risk language is too vague to act on.
- Accepted risks are never reviewed.
- Mitigation tasks are not owned.
Review guidance
Review this page after a material incident, after a role or system change, and on a normal cadence appropriate to its risk. During review, check whether the owner is still correct, whether inputs are still complete, whether the output is still useful, and whether related pages need updates.
External guidance
These resources are references for terminology, control thinking, or review design. DailyWF adapts the ideas into lightweight operating pages rather than reproducing full standards.
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0General cybersecurity risk management structure: govern, identify, protect, detect, respond, recover.
- NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 control catalogSecurity and privacy control language useful when translating operating work into controls.