Team:Hamburg/Practices/Risks

Risk Assessment

This Risk Assessment will available for all iGEM Teams soon!

What is QSEC?

  • Web based Risk Management tool
  • Developed in cooperation with WMC company, leading supplier of integrated information security management systems

Why adapt an IT security tool to a research project at a laboratory?

QSEC Biosafety gives you the possibility to evaluate each process of your research project by linking it to the used assets and information. Each risk concerns the integrity of the process itself and the person performing it, giving you a full risk report by classifying risks in categories A (high), B (middle) and C (low). You also have the option to integrate a legal directive and link it to your processes and assets to easily check, if all of them are correctly executed.

Calculation of the risks

Exemplary implementation

  1. Organize your project in individual processes
  2. Rate criticality of each process considering confidentiality, integrity and availability
    3. Evaluation of the processes
  3. Link required assets to each process
    4. Combination with the asset groups
  4. Rate the assets criticality considering confidentiality, integrity and availability
  5. Determine threats and vulnerabilities and rate them
  6. Get full risk report about your A,B and C risks
    7. List of the discovered risks
    Categorization of the risks into critical (red), mediocre (yellow) and uncritical (green) ones

Perspective

This method gives you a detailed overview of all your potential risks within biological research and allows you to evaluate and manage them. This could be of special interest, if you are planning a research project in for example the field of molecular virology, where the exposure to dangerous biological material is omnipresent. In addition to the shown aspects of the software you can add measurements to each risk in the next step and keep track of your improvement in implementing these. A big advantage as well is the function to integrate a legal directive. We for example included the ‘Directive 2000/54/EC of the European parliament on the protection of workers from risks related to exposure to biological agents at work’. This method can be customised to each research project in an individual lab and allows you to improve biosafety to an big extent as well as saving potential costs due to damage and loss of data.

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