Information Technology (IT) has brought a revolution in the working of banks in India, it also carries various risks. Explain the various types of IT risks and control mechanism for managing these risks.

IT risks can be classified according to their impact on the organisation, as listed below: Security Risk: The risk that information will be altered, accessed, or used by unauthorised parties. Sources of security risk could be external attacks, malicious code, physical destruction inappropriate access, unsatisfied employees, variety of platform and messaging types. Potential impacts associated with them are corruption of information, external fraud, identify theft, theft of financial assets, damage to reputation and damage to assets. Availability Risk: The risk that information or applications will be inaccessible due to system failure or natural disaster, including recovery period. Sources of availability risks are hardware failure, network outages, data centre failures and force majeure. Potential impacts associated with them are abandoned transactions, lost sales, reduced level of customer, or employee confidence, interruption or delay of business critical processes, reduced IT staff productivity. Performance Risk: The risk that under performance of systems, applications, or personnel, or IT as a whole will diminish business productivity or value. Sources of performance risk are poor system architectures, network congestion, inefficient code, inadequate capacity. Potential impacts associated with them are reduced customer satisfaction and loyalty, interruption or delay of business-critical process, lost IT productivity. Compliance Risk: It is a risk of information handling or processing fails to meet regulatory, IT or business policy requirements. Usually, it involves penalties, fines, or loss of reputation from failure to comply with laws or regulations, or consequences of non-compliance with IT policies. Sources of compliance risks are regulations unique to each jurisdiction, legal actions, internal IT safeguards supporting compliance, inadequate third-party compliance standards etc. Potential impacts associated with them are - damage to reputation, breach of client confidentially, litigation etc. Mechanism for controlling IT risks: An effective control mechanism is required for managing risks in IT areas. These controls are as under: Preventive Controls: This control mechanism that stops errors and mistakes from occurring. Good layout of forms or screen to a large extent reduces the likelihood of mistakes while feeding the data. Detective Controls: They identify the errors after they are committed. This is done through what is known as validation protocols or programmes. Corrective Controls: These controls eliminate or reduce errors after identification of such data with errors or irregularities. The basic purpose of these controls is to prevent the occurrence of errors or irregularities in the system. Secondly inspite of such prevention if such errors or irregularities continues to occur, they need to be detected and eliminated or corrected.