The concept of risk is not strange to businesses in particular and those who do business in general. “Doing businesses is taking the risk” became a popular saying of the business people, whether they are owners of large or small businesses.

Although business has to face with risk every day and every hour but risk management is relatively new concept, not many businesses have understanding about it. Therefore, the risk management activities of the business are often being conducted in a half-hearted way. Not many businesses, including large enterprises, have proper risk management departments in their organizational structure. Hence, the uncertainties and crises are usually occurs, causing negative effects and sometimes become disaster for the business.

There are always potential risks in any business environment, whether that environment is developed with clear and transparency rules, or that environment is primitive environment with many confusing and complicated. If the business environment is primitive with inexperienced entrepreneurs, there will be more risks. Risk can be derived from many factors in which the subjective factors may cause risk to occur more with more severe consequences, or vice versa, enterprise can stop the risk or significantly reduce its impact. This depends on the risk management capacity of organizations and businesses.

Risk management is the process of analyzing the environment (inside, outside) to identify, analyze, evaluate, classify, ranking and implementing appropriate solutions to respond to risks to eliminate or minimize the negative impacts that may have. In many cases, risk management includes identifying opportunities within the risk, in order to exploit, take advantage of them and bring benefits to compensate for the damages caused by the risk.

Risk management is different from risk control and risk handling. Risk control is the response activities for the risks that have been identified. Risk handling is dealing with risks and crisis after it has actually occurred. Risk management is the systematic activities, maintaining at every level and assigning to a specialized department.

Properly understand the nature and importance of risk management, business will definitely not hesitate in setting up a professional risk management system. An effective risk management system helps businesses to identify risks early (which are very diverse, extensive and constantly changing), evaluate the possibility to occur and the degree of harm to have effective response measures. Unfortunately, the subjectivity is still the characteristic of many businesses in the risky business environment.