Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience vs. cybersecurity

In recent years, organizations around the globe have been understandably focused on cybersecurity. Threats continue to grow in severity, and cyber criminals are capable of launching devastating, more sophisticated attacks on even the most vigilant companies. The size of the average organizational attack surface has grown as well, thanks to digital transformation and ever-larger vendor footprints. To survive in this new era, companies must evolve their focus on cybersecurity to a commitment to cyber resilience.

Being resilient in the face of cyber threats requires comprehensive security programs and continual efforts to mitigate risk. Bitsight can help – with solutions for continuously monitoring security performance, measuring security controls, mitigating supply chain risk, and quantifying cyber risk for business leaders.

How to build cyber resilience

Cyber resilience requires an adaptive approach to security that helps security organizations quickly adapt to the latest threats without impacting business performance. In contrast to traditional security programs that focus on remediating issues, adaptive security achieves cyber resilience through continuous monitoring and reducing risk at the root cause. By quickly uncovering anomalies, malicious traffic, and vulnerabilities in the attack surface, security teams can block potential risks from becoming detrimental through root-cause analysis and predictive analytics.

To maintain cyber resilience through adaptive security, organizations should focus on four key tasks:

Evaluate security performance 24/7

Rather than scheduling periodic cybersecurity audits, organizations can proactively manage risk by continuously monitoring IT infrastructure for vulnerabilities, such as unpatched systems, open ports, misconfigured software, and malware infections.

Continuously assess security controls

Monitoring the effectiveness of security controls can help organizations avoid the “whack-a-mole” syndrome where new issues pop up as soon as old ones are fixed. By continuously assessing the effectiveness of every security control even when imminent risks aren’t present, risk managers can better understand root causes and prevent issues in the first place. For this, your team can start with some basic cyber resilience metrics like response speed.

Monitor supply chain risk

As supply chains become more interconnected, third-party risk has become a leading cause of data breaches. Traditional risk assessment tools like vendor security risk assessment questionnaires only provide a point-in-time view of supply chain risk. To achieve cyber resilience, organizations should continuously monitor the security performance of their entire third-party portfolio, looking for concerning levels of risk in the security posture of vendors.

Quantify cyber risk

Too often, cyber risk is seen by business leaders as a technology problem with no clear impact on the business. To engage executives and board members in productive discussions about cyber risk priorities and cyber resilience, organizations need tools to financially quantify the impact of risk, enabling leaders to make better decisions about security program resources and investments.

Building cyber resilience with Bitsight

Bitsight provides trusted data and insights that enable organizations to make better risk-based decisions. The Bitsight platform offers a suite of solutions that can help organizations achieve cyber resilience and reduce the impact of cyber risk.

Bitsight solutions are based on Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings, a tool that organizations can use to proactively reduce risk throughout their attack surface. Providing an outside-in view of the security posture of organizations and their third-party portfolio, Bitsight Security Ratings take the guesswork out of measuring security performance.

Bitsight ratings range in value from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the rating, the stronger an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Ratings are based on objective, externally verifiable data points covering four areas of cyber risk: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed data breaches. By analyzing and weighting 100 billion new events each day, Bitsight produces daily security ratings for 40 million+ organizations worldwide.

Elements of the Bitsight platform

Fueled by daily security ratings, Bitsight solutions provide the insight organizations need to monitor security performance and achieve cyber resilience.

Bitsight for Security Performance Management

This Bitsight solution provides tools to continuously assess cybersecurity programs. Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables evidence-based cyber risk monitoring, continuous measuring of security control effectiveness, remediation of gaps and vulnerabilities, and effective assurance to drive confidence across the business.

Bitsight Control Insights

Part of Bitsight SPM, Control Insights enables continuous controls monitoring through a best practice framework to measure how effective an organization’s security controls are. Control Insights also suggests how to remediate gaps in controls and enables a proactive approach to cyber resilience.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

This Bitsight solution helps reduce risk across the supply chain by enabling organizations to continually measure and monitor third-party and forth-party security controls. Bitsight for Third Party Risk Management increases confidence in supply chain security by validating vendor assessments throughout the entire lifecycle, continuously monitoring vendors’ security posture, and delivering effective assurance that third-party security controls are being managed effectively.

Bitsight Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk

As an add-on module to Bitsight SPM, this cyber risk quantification solution helps CISOs and CIOs to provide business context and data-driven metrics that quantify cyber risk in terms of its cost to the business.

Why Bitsight?

As the world’s leading security reporting service, Bitsight delivers actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks through continuous monitoring of objective and independently verified data. Bitsight Security Ratings are a proven cybersecurity assessment tool, providing a dynamic measurement of the security posture of organizations and their vendors, which can be compared to peer performance. Leading organizations around the globe rely on Bitsight to help make more strategic decisions about cyber security policy, to strengthen third-party risk management, to improve critical infrastructure cybersecurity, and to enhance cyber threat intelligence.

Founded in 2011, Bitsight today has 2400+ global customers and provides Security Ratings on 40 million organizations worldwide. Bitsight is the choice of all of the Big 4 accounting firms, 20% of the Fortune 1000, and 120+ government institutions in 30 countries.