What is cyber exposure management?
Cyber exposure management is the practice of continuously monitoring cyber exposure, measuring the effectiveness of security programs, and taking steps to address the areas of greatest risk and exposure.
The challenge of cyber exposure management
CISOs and risk leaders today face a host of new challenges and opportunities. Massive digital footprints continue to expand, the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and insurance premiums are on the rise. At the same time, more boards of directors are accepting that cyber risk is business risk and are inviting CISOs to take a greater role in leading the company by enhancing cyber exposure management.
To excel in this expanded role, CISOs need exposure management tools that can help their organizations achieve alignment on how to quantify risk, manage it, and make the right investments to mitigate it. The right solutions must help CISOs uncover risk blind spots, assess performance, qualify vendors, and minimize financial loss at scale.
As a global cyber risk management leader, Bitsight offers cyber exposure management solutions that transform how organizations manage cyber exposure, security performance, and cyber risk for themselves and their third parties. Built on more than a decade of market-leading innovation, Bitsight offers integrated solutions that deliver value across enterprise security performance, digital supply chains, cyber insurance, and data analysis.
How to reduce your cyber exposure
There are four key steps you can take to limit your organization’s cyber exposure and strengthen defenses against potential threats.
Proactively identify risk
As your digital ecosystem expands, cyber risk management tools can constantly and automatically search for and identify areas of cyber exposure. Points of exposure may include misconfigured software, software vulnerabilities, unpatched systems, open ports, and other areas of risk that may easily be exploited by attackers. With superior technology, you can identify areas of disproportionate risk across your digital ecosystem and prioritize remediation to improve your security posture.
Establish a cyber exposure response team
To effectively manage cyber exposure and mitigate risks, you’ll need the combined efforts of individuals from different business units and disciplines throughout your organization. Your CISO will lead efforts to manage immediate threats, but your legal team will need to jump in when customer data is exposed. Communications teams must craft messaging and reach out to customers, partners, and stakeholders in the event of a breach, and sales teams will need to do the same with prospects and partners. HR managers play an important role as well in helping to alleviate employee concerns.
Create a communication plan
When a breach occurs, your team will need to alert stakeholders, customers, vendors, employees, and partners about what has happened even as your technical teams work to mitigate the damage. Communication efforts should explain clearly what has happened, how it will impact each audience, and what you’re doing to address the problem now and in the future. An effective communications plan will mitigate long-term financial impact and reputational challenges.
Monitor your attack surface continuously
Because the cyber threat landscape changes daily, you must continuously monitor the attack surface of both your organization and your third-party vendors to ensure the security controls in place meet your standards. This is a change from traditional third-party risk management practices that rely on annual or bi-annual questionnaires to monitor vendors’ security postures.
Cyber exposure management with Bitsight
Having created the security ratings industry in 2011, Bitsight has expanded to offer integrated solutions that address the broader challenges of CISOs and risk leaders. As digital transformation, supply chain risk, and expanded attack surfaces create greater cyber exposure, our comprehensive approach to cyber risk management helps global enterprises, governments, and organizations prioritize cybersecurity investments, reduce the chances of financial loss, and build greater trust within their ecosystem.
As one of the core solutions on our platform, Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) is a cybersecurity governance and cyber exposure management solution that gives risk and security leaders unique insights to drive strategy and improve security performance. With Bitsight SPM, you can see what attackers see, understand your financial exposure, and prioritize remediation to address your most serious vulnerabilities. This cyber risk management solution empowers you to elevate cyber exposure management, confidently communicating and proving program performance to organizational leadership and board members.
Based on Bitsight’s Cyber Risk Analytics Engine that delivers market-leading data, insights, and workflows, SPM provides superior capabilities in several key areas.
- External attack surface management. Gain full visibility into your attack surface and understand where exposure exists today and how to monitor it in the future. Continuously discover new assets that require protection and prioritize your most vulnerable areas.
- Governance and analytics. Build an effective cyber exposure management strategy with objective, proven metrics and security ratings that are correlated to outcomes. Identify areas for focus, implement improvement plans that make sense, and track performance over time in meaningful ways.
- Cyber risk quantification. Translate cyber risk into financial terms that board members can understand and leaders can use to manage risk. Set the right priorities, calibrate cyber insurance based on unique risk appetites, and prove ROI over time to stakeholders.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics
Part of Bitsight SPM, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics delivers a comprehensive view of your attack surface both on-premises and in the cloud to enhance cyber exposure management. With this security risk management solution, you can continuously discover and segment the assets, applications, and devices that are part of your expanding digital footprint. Bitsight also makes it easy to assess current risk exposure, prioritize your most valuable assets, and take actions to reduce risk.
With Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, you can:
- Gain greater visibility into digital assets. A centralized dashboard reveals the location of your organization’s digital assets broken down by cloud provider, business unit, and geography. Bitsight also calculates the corresponding cyber risk associated with each asset to enable faster remediation.
- Uncover shadow IT. Identify hidden assets and cloud instances, evaluate their risk level, and align them with your organization’s security policies.
- Pinpoint areas of disproportionate risk. Visualize areas of critical or excessive risk—including areas of highest exposure—to prioritize remediation.
- Monitor risk within shared responsibility models for cloud services. The shared security model used by most cloud providers makes it difficult to understand and track the security posture of cloud-hosted assets. Bitsight helps eliminate security gaps by providing visibility into the risk profile of assets stored in cloud environments.
- Identify risk on remote networks. Discover cyber risk associated with the expanded attack surface created by home and remote offices and unmonitored or unsecured connections.
In addition to tools for managing security performance, Bitsight also offers third-party risk management capabilities with technology for vendor risk assessment and vendor risk monitoring to accurately identify and prioritize risk within larger digital ecosystems.
Why CISOs choose Bitsight
As the cyber threat landscape worsens and the global regulatory landscape demands more nimble and thorough risk management, Bitsight continues to evolve to meet the growing needs of our customers. CISOs, risk leaders, business leaders, and boards turn to our integrated solutions to manage cyber risk and build trust across their ecosystems. We help stabilize cyber risk uncertainty and give CISOs more control, ownership, and confidence.
Over 3,000+ global enterprises trust our data, tools, and integrated applications to drive critical workflows across exposure, performance, and risk. With Bitsight, CISOs and their organizations can expand distributed ecosystems without expanding attack surfaces, accelerate transformation without risking financial turbulence, and add vendors without adding their vulnerabilities. Ultimately, Bitsight helps everyone speak a common language when it comes to risk, turning caution into vision and building the kind of trust across distributed systems that frees organizations to grow with confidence.