Risk assessment

1) Goals and principles

Objective: early detection and prioritization of threats affecting SLO, revenue, regulatory compliance and reputation.
Principles: consistency, measurability, repeatability, binding to business value, SLO-first.
Result: a transparent portfolio of risks with understandable owners, measures and deadlines.

2) Terms

Risk: probability × impact of an adverse event.
Risk appetite: the level of residual risk acceptable to the organization.
Vulnerability/impact/control: weak point, trigger and existing measures.
KRI (Key Risk Indicators): leading indicators (for example, growth of p99-latency, consumer-lag, rejection of payment conversion).

3) Risk Classification for iGaming

Operational: overload, release failures, queues, database/cache degradation, incidents in data centers/AZ/regions.
Technology/security: DDoS, vulnerabilities, leaks, configuration errors, dependence on key libraries.
Payment/financial: drop in authorizations, chargeback growth, provider unavailability, FX unrest, fraud.
Dependencies/ecosystem: failures at game providers, CDN/WAF, KYC/AML, SMS/e-mail gateways.
Compliance/regulatory: violation of license requirements, KYC/AML, responsible play, data storage.
Product/marketing: unpredictable traffic peaks (tournaments, matches, promos), bonus segmentation misses.
Reputational: negative in media/social media due to incidents or non-compliance.

4) Risk assessment process (box)

1. Establishing context: goals, SLOs, regulatory requirements, architectural boundaries, value chain.
2. Identification: collection of candidate events: incident retrospectives, dependency audits, brainstorming sessions, checklists.
3. Analysis: qualitative (scenarios, Bow-Tie) and quantitative (frequencies/distributions).
4. Assessment: comparison with risk appetite, ranking, approval of priorities.
5. Processing: prevention, reduction, transfer (insurance/contracts), acceptance (conscious).
6. Monitoring and revision: KRI, effectiveness checks of controls, registry updates, readiness tests.

5) Quality techniques

Probability/impact matrix: 1-5 scales (Very Low... Very High). Impact is considered separately along the axes: SLA/revenue/regulatory/reputation.
Bow-Tie Analysis: causes → event → consequences; for each party - preventive and mitigating controls.
FTA (Fault Tree Analysis): logical fault trees for critical services (deposit, rate, output).
HAZOP/What-If: What-If Systematic Survey on interfaces and procedures.

6) Quantitative techniques

ALE (Annualized Loss Expectation): ALE = SLE × ARO (expected annual damage).
VaR/CVaR: risk capital at a given confidence level (for cash gaps/payment providers).
Monte-Carlo: simulation of traffic peaks/provider failures/payment conversions with confidence intervals.

FMEA: Severity (S), Frequency (O), Detectability (D) → RPN = S × O × D, Patch Prioritization

Reliability math: headroom, MTTF/MTTR, burn-rate error budget, joint failure probabilities (AZ + provider).

7) Risk appetite and thresholds

Define categories (high/medium/low) for SLA losses, penalties, revenue loss per hour/day.
Set escalation thresholds: when an incident/risk moves between levels, who is required to collect the var room.
Write exceptions (temporary risk-taking) with revision date and closing plan.

8) KRI and early warning

• Performance: p95/p99 ↑, timeout growth, queue depth, cache-hit drop, replication lag.
• Payments: ↓ authorizations in a specific GEO/bank, soft-decline growth, AOV anomalies.
• Safety: 4xx/5xx spikes in critical endpoints, increase in WAF triggers, new CVEs in dependencies.
• Compliance: exceeding storage limits, KYC delays, share of self-exclusions without processing.
• For each KRI - owner, metric, thresholds, sources, auto-alerts.

9) Impact assessment (multi-axis)

SLA/SLO: min/hours off target, impact on SLA bonuses to partners.
Finance: direct losses (outstanding transactions, chargeback), indirect (churn, fines).
Regulatory: risk of sanctions/suspension of license/mandatory notifications.

Reputation: NPS/CSAT, spate of negative mentions, impact on partners and streamers

10) Risk handling (catalogue of measures)

Prevention: rejection of risky features/patterns, blast-radius limitation (tenant-isolation, rate-limit).
Reduction: database sharding, caching, pool/quotas, multi-payment provider, canary releases.
Transfer: cyber risk insurance, SLA compensation in contracts, escrow.
Acceptance: documented decision at controlled residual risk, with KRI and exit plan.

11) Roles and RACI

Responsible: Risk/Ops/SRE/Payments/SecOps domain owners.
Accountable: Head of Ops/CTO/CRO.
Consulted: Product, Data/DS, Legal/Compliance, Finance.
Informed: Support, Marketing, Partner Management.

12) Artifacts and patterns

Risk Register: ID, description, category, reasons, probability, axis impact, existing controls, KRI, processing plan, owner, term.
Risk Heatmap: aggregated map by department/service.
Dependency Map: critical external and internal dependencies, backup levels, contact information.
Runbooks/Playbooks: specific steps when triggered by KRI/incident, kill-switches, degradation.
Quarterly Risk Review: set of changes, closed/new risks, KRI trends, effectiveness of controls.

13) Integration with SLO/Incident Management

Risks are converted into SLO targets (latency, error-rate, availability) and error budget.
KRI → alert policies (fast/slow burn-rate).
In post-mortem, it is mandatory to record the update of the risk assessment and adjustments of controls.

14) Tools and data

Monitoring/observability: metrics, logs, traces; "risk views" panels.
Directories and CMDBs: services, owners, dependent components.
GRC/Task tracker: storage of the register of risks, statuses, audit actions.
Data/ML: anomaly models, load/failure prediction, Monte-Carlo simulations.

15) Implementation Roadmap (8-10 weeks)

Ned. 1-2: context and frame; list of critical services and dependencies; determination of risk appetite.
Ned. 3-4: initial risk identification (workshops, retro), registry filling, draft heatmap.
Ned. 5-6: setting up KRI and alerts, linking to SLO; Bow-Tie/FTA launch for top 5 risks.

Ned. 7-8: quantification (ALE/VaR/Monte-Carlo) for financially significant scenarios; Approval of processing plans

Ned. 9-10: readiness testing (game day, failover), threshold correction, launch of quarterly reviews.

16) Examples of assessed risks (iGaming)

1. Failure of PSP-1 authorizations in prime time

Probability: Medium; Impact: High (revenue, SLA).
KRI: bank/GEO authorization conversion, soft-decline growth.
Measures: multi-provider, health & fee routing, jitter retreats, pause limits.

2. Overload of the betting database per day of the Champions League match

Probability: Medium; Impact: High (SLO).
KRI: replication lag, p99 requests, lock-wait growth.
Measures: cache/CQRS, sharding, line preload, read-only mode of part of the feature.

3. DDoS to public APIs

Probability: Low-Medium; Impact: High (availability, reputation).
KRI: SYN/HTTP spike, WAF triggers.
Measures: CDN/WAF, rate-limit, tokens, captchas, bot traffic isolation.

4. Regulatory nonconformity for KYC storage

Probability: Low; Impact: Very high (penalty/licence).
KRI: delay checks> SLA, exceeding retention.
Measures: policy-as-code, automatic TTL, audit and production data tests.

17) Antipatterns

Assessment by eye without registry and KRI.
Matrices without money and SLO → incorrect priorities.
Rare reviews (registry not updated after incidents).
"Processing" only by documentation without implemented controls/tests.
Ignore external dependencies and contract SLAs.

18) Reporting and Communication

Exec Summary: Top 10 Risks, KRI Trends, Residual Risk vs Appetite, Closing Plan.
Tech reports: effectiveness of controls, game day results, threshold changes.
Regularity: monthly reviews + quarterly deep revaluation.

Total

Risk assessment is not a static document, but a living cycle: they identified → calculated → agreed on the risk appetite → selected and implemented measures → checked with data and exercises → updated the register. This framework links operational decisions to business value and reduces the frequency/scale of incidents while maintaining compliance with SLOs and regulatory requirements.