Continuous Controls Monitoring

Improve security with continuous controls monitoring

No matter how strong your security programs are, you’re bound to have vulnerabilities in your security controls. Gaps like misconfigured software, unpatched systems, and open ports can all expose your organization to cyber risk. Even when you remediate these gaps, new issues will inevitably arise over time. Traditional security solutions help resolve these issues, but they’re merely addressing symptoms on a case-by-case basis rather than identifying root causes.

Constantly assessing the effectiveness of your security controls requires significant and costly manual effort, expertise, and analysis. That’s why Bitsight for Security Performance Management has introduced Control Insights, a continuous controls monitoring solution to help you move away from tactical methods of fixing vulnerabilities to a strategic focus on the true variables that impact cyber risk.

The importance of continuous controls monitoring

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) suggests that implementing recommended critical security controls help you to prevent the majority of cyberattacks your organization will face each year. But along with putting controls in place, you must also continually look for gaps in security programs and controls—and take steps to remediate them.

This type of continuous controls monitoring involves three essential technologies:

1. Inventorying controls. Determine which controls are currently in place as part of your security performance management program.
2. Identifying your attack surface. Assemble a comprehensive view of the attack surface that your controls are meant to protect. This comprises your entire digital footprint including subsidiaries, geographies, assets, IPs, and domains.
3. Assessing effectiveness of controls. Continually assess how effective your controls are so you can identify gaps for remediation.

Bitsight Control Insights

Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) provides tools for tracking and improving security program performance over time. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight SPM facilitates cyber risk oversight and streamlines program management decisions.

Control Insights, a new feature of Bitsight SPM, provides an automated approach to continuous controls monitoring. Control Insights uses a best practice framework to measure how effective your security controls are and to suggest the best ways to remediate any gaps. Leveraging over 200 billion externally observable events each day that are gathered from more than 120 different sources, Control Insights offers an objective, evidence-based, continuous controls monitoring capability to measure the effectiveness of your controls consistently and reliably.

Unlike point solutions that only measure the effectiveness of a single control, Control Insights assesses effectiveness across your extended organization without requiring any initial configuration. Control Insights measures security program progress over the past six months to streamline efforts to develop performant security controls. Insights available through this Bitsight technology include:

• A prescriptive analysis of each control’s effectiveness.
• An explanation as to why a Control Insight was triggered.
• Details about the evidence surrounding each security control.

Benefits of continuous controls monitoring with Bitsight

When relying on Bitsight Control Insights, your security teams count on several essential benefits.

Root cause analysis of security vulnerabilities

Rather than simply resolving issues, Bitsight Control Insights identifies the true variables that impact cyber risk, providing your team with a more meaningful way to improve overall security performance.

No more “whack-a-mole” with security findings

By addressing the root causes of security gaps, you can avoid the “whack-a-mole” syndrome where a gap is fixed one week only to see a similar issue pop up the next. For example, rather than simply identifying and removing expired certificates from digital assets Control Insights empowers security teams to implement a control to prevent expired certificates in the first place.

A proactive approach to addressing gaps

Control Insights enables the kind of continuous controls monitoring that enables you to proactively secure your organization against an evolving threat landscape.

Why choose Bitsight?

As a pioneer in the industry since 2011, Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of Security Ratings. Today, Bitsight counts among its customers 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 20% of the world’s countries, four of the top five investment banks, and all of the big four accounting firms.

Through continuous monitoring and assessment—including cyber risk monitoring, attack surface monitoring, and cloud security monitoring—Bitsight enables customers to make faster and more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and third-party risk. Along with solutions for monitoring security controls, Bitsight solutions can help improve cyber resilience, strengthen critical infrastructure cybersecurity¸ enhance cyber threat intelligence, and provide cyber risk quantification for stronger decision-making around security investments.

Bitsight’s security offerings are built on three pillars:

• Visibility. Bitsight’s Security Ratings are an objective, verifiable, and actionable measurement of security performance. We provide insight into 25 risk vectors across compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches.
• An engaged community. The Bitsight platform is home to the most robust community of cyber risk professionals in the world, as over 2,400 Bitsight customers share ratings with more than 170,000 third-party organizations.
• Prioritization & context. Only the most critical, high-quality risk vectors are incorporated into Bitsight ratings. Our technology provides a larger view into your attack surface and gives your teams an easy, visual way to prioritize and collaborate internally and externally to address the largest areas of cyber risk.