Elevate Cyber Risk to Business Risk With Financial Quantification

There’s no question about it: Being exposed to cyber risk is an inevitable part of doing business in today’s world. In fact, a recent ESG study found that 82% of organizations believe that cyber risk has increased over the past two years.

Unfortunately, for many of these organizations, cyber risk is seen as complex and too often discussed in technical terms or through the lens of remediation plans for security incidents. According to the ESG study, 69% of business and technology leaders believe cybersecurity is entirely or mostly a technology area with little or no linkage to the business.

These conditions highlight an important challenge for today’s security leaders: In order to position security similarly to other business initiatives, they need to provide cyber risk quantification insights in financial terms — ultimately helping non-technical stakeholders understand how cyber risk translates into business risk.

Why It’s More Important Than Ever to Quantify Cyber Risk Financially

It’s clear that today’s CISOs must work within the technical realm and the business realm in order to make informed, data-driven decisions that empower them to both secure the necessary budget and protect the organization’s interests.

Of course, in order to do this effectively, security leaders need a cyber risk quantification framework that allows them to report to the board and other non-technical stakeholders in a language they understand — aligned with how the organization assesses other initiatives that receive funding.

By quantifying cyber risk financially, CISOs can analyze cyber risk in the same way the organization looks at all other types of risk: in terms of its impact on financial targets. This process puts the intangible nature of cyber risk into tangible business context — helping stakeholders understand the organization’s potential financial exposure due to various risk factors and impact scenarios. 

Armed with these data-driven insights, decision-makers can allocate resources and prioritize remediation efforts based on how much the organization stands to lose financially if they don’t address a particular gap in their security program.

Introducing Bitsight Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk

Though many security leaders recognize the value of financial quantification, it has traditionally been a complex, time-consuming process — involving long data collection processes, outside consultants, and other limited resources. While an organization’s cybersecurity posture is changing every day, this traditional approach for assessing their corresponding financial exposure isn’t easily repeatable and thereby fails to provide the necessary real-time context.

Given these challenges, Bitsight is extremely excited to announce the launch of Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk, an add-on module to our Security Performance Management suite of solutions. This new offering makes it faster and easier than ever to quantify your cyber risk financially — with the resources you have today. 

Financial Quantification complements the Bitsight Security Rating, combining real-world cyber event data with Bitsight’s context into your digital assets and cybersecurity posture to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive financial quantification analysis. This mix of technographic data, firmographic data, cyber insurance claims data, and cyber scenario probability calculations drive the model to simulate financial exposure across multiple types of cyber events and impact scenarios in an efficient and easily repeatable way. 

The approach models potential loss types independently — combining the results to deliver an analysis of probable maximum loss. This model is iterative and evaluates features of both past and current cyber events. As such, users can feel confident that the event catalog provides a solid baseline assessment of the potential impact of gaps in their security controls. And because this turnkey solution builds off of existing Bitsight data, you can implement it quickly and easily — without investing in any additional headcount or outside resources.

Drive Meaningful Cyber Risk Quantification Conversations Across Your Organization

With this on-demand, analytical view of your organization’s financial exposure, you’re empowered to change how cybersecurity is discussed at the board level and across your business. Now, it’s easier than ever for non-technical stakeholders to understand cyber risk in financial terms and evaluate the ROI of your security controls. By incorporating Financial Quantification into your cybersecurity program, you can:

• Make more informed decisions about what risk to accept, mitigate, or transfer: The combined set of metrics provided by Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk uniquely enables you to prioritize resources based on which programs and controls will have the most significant impact on your cyber risk and financial exposure. 
• Communicate the value of security investments to the board and other stakeholders: With Financial Quantification, you can quantify your risk over time — empowering you to measure how your financial exposure changes as you invest in controls to improve your security posture, thereby helping to demonstrate the impact and effectiveness of your efforts.

By driving this universal understanding of cyber risk across your organization, you can empower decision-makers to deliver better and more secure business outcomes for your investors, business partners, and customers.

Interested in learning more about Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk? Check out our ebook, Establishing a Universal Understanding of Cyber Risk With Financial Quantification.