Security Performance in Business Context: How Forecasts Empower Organizations to Improve Processes

Security Performance in Business Context: How Forecasts Empower Organizations to Improve Processes
Written by Angela Gelnaw
Director, Ecosystem Strategy

When it comes to managing your organization’s cybersecurity performance, understanding the business context in which you make decisions is key. By leveraging security ratings you can understand the efficacy of your current security program, identify control gaps and/or failures, and determine the best allocation of resources that will lead to overall process improvement. With this level of visibility, security and risk leaders can now lead more data-driven conversations around cybersecurity with internal and external stakeholders about important security initiatives and feel more confident in the investments they are making in their security programs.It’s critical that security leaders understand how to prioritize their efforts. Bitsight for security performance management allows you to easily examine the importance of an event based on both asset importance and event severity. And now with Bitsight’s new integration between the Asset Risk Matrix and the Bitsight Forecasting engine — any security team can quickly assess the expected impact of their efforts based on Bitsight’s recommended remediation plan.

When trying to understand how to best allocate your resources and investments, it’s helpful to ask a few key questions: What are my biggest security program failures? What is the expected impact of improving them? Using Bitsight’s new Remediation Forecast panel, you receive a default action plan with the ability to customize it based on specific constraints and requirements unique to your security program and organization. Using the entire suite of security performance management capabilities — Bitsight for Security Performance Management, Peer Analytics, and Forecasting — you can ensure that you have the information you need to make risk-based decisions around both how to prioritize remediation efforts and plan security investments.

The default action plan that Bitsight provides in the Remediation Forecasts panel should help guide your organization down the road to continuous process improvement. Bitsight’s goal is to help organizations identify key areas of weakness — not just issues that simply require fixing. With focused attention on process failure and improvement, security and risk leaders can increase efficiency and business alignment.

Bitsight’s Forecasting engine allows you to run scenarios and assess the potential impact on your Bitsight rating. It also allows you to see the impact of new security projects (ex: like what would happen if you revamped your incident response program or if you got hit with a botnet this year) on your overall security program.

Whether you are leveraging Bitsight’s Forecasting engine to gain a quick assessment of highest impact activities & their expected impact or to run more advanced scenario analyses to help determine the impact of program changes, Bitsight Forecasting allows you to leverage security ratings to determine realistic goals, track their progress, and report on program improvement and outcomes.