Cybersecurity Governance

What is Cybersecurity Governance?

Cybersecurity governance is the process of establishing the architecture that ensures a company’s security programs align with business objectives, comply with regulations and standards (such as PCI security standards), and achieve objectives for managing security and risk.

Metrics and Cybersecurity Governance

Cybersecurity governance is a critically important part of managing security and risk in organizations large and small. As a responsibility of boards and executive leaders to enforce, cybersecurity governance ensures that a company’s cybersecurity model and program align with business objectives, complies with government or industry regulations, and achieves the goals that leadership has set out for managing security and risk.

Reporting on cloud security metrics is key to governance. A clear view of the performance of security programs enables boards and executives to make informed decisions about cybersecurity policy and investments, and to know whether the organization’s security objectives and requirements are being met. However, most organizations lack the clear, objective, and actionable metrics they need to support cybersecurity governance. And without a superior reporting structure, the time and cost of preparing reports can tax an already overwhelmed security team.

Bitsight can help. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides organizations with data-driven, objective, and dynamic measurement of their security performance and attack surface – and the security posture of their third-party vendors. By immediately exposing risk within an IT ecosystem and supply chain, Bitsight delivers the information organizations need to govern their security programs more effectively with customizable reports tailored to their organization’s specific needs.

Bitsight Security Ratings Facilitate Governance

Bitsight Security Ratings measure an organization’s security performance. Like credit ratings, Bitsight ratings offer an outside-in approach that evaluates performance with analysis of externally observable data. Armed with daily Bitsight ratings, organizations can proactively quantify and manage risk and improve cybersecurity governance.

Unlike other security assessment tools that rely on periodic scans, Bitsight continuously measures performance based on four categories of data: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Ratings are calculated with a proprietary algorithm, and Bitsight Security Ratings are proven to correlate to likelihood of potential breaches. The higher a company’s rating, the better it is at implementing good security practices and continuous managing new risks to their network.

With Bitsight Security Ratings, security leaders, executives, and boards have the tools to better identify and remediate risk and cybersecurity threats.

Bitsight Solutions for Cybersecurity Governance

Bitsight Security Ratings are the foundation for a suite of solutions that help organizations heighten security performance, mitigate risk, and strengthen cybersecurity governance. These include:

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight helps organizations take a risk-based, outcome-driven approach to managing cybersecurity governance and security programs. Bitsight enables security and risk leaders to measure the performance of security programs and align investments and actions to produce the highest measurable impact. Bitsight makes it easy to allocate resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk while facilitating data-driven, risk-based conversations about cybersecurity governance among key stakeholders.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management. Assessing the security of every vendor has traditionally been a time-consuming task with uneven results. Traditional methods for assessment are resource-intensive and don’t allow for continuous measurement or a proper look into the vendors that will have access to your most sensitive data. With Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, organizations can continuously monitor and quantify the cyber risk of vendors to efficiently scale their third-party risk management programs. Security ratings provide a simple snapshot of each organization’s security posture, allowing risk teams to track a company’s performance over time, collaborate on remediation plans, or set performance standards in contracts.
• Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking. Comparing security performance and posture against peers and competitors is an essential part of cybersecurity governance. Bitsight delivers a continuous, data-driven measure of security performance to provide a quantified baseline and comparative data. With benchmarking tools from Bitsight, organizations can measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to industry peers, and communicate meaningful security program updates to senior leadership using KPI’s they are familiar with.

Bitsight Methodology and Governance Process

When organizations use Bitsight Security Ratings to make critical business decisions, it’s important that the ratings themselves are accurate and trustworthy. Bitsight was founded with the goal of increasing transparency around cybersecurity to enable dynamic, informed interactions between global market participants.

Bitsight’s governance process provides guidelines for responsible development of security ratings. In 2017, Bitsight helped create the “Principles for Fair and Accurate Security Ratings,” a set of practices that affirm the role of ratings in promoting security and govern the responsibility of companies like Bitsight in creating these measurements.

To enable stronger cybersecurity governance based on concrete data, Bitsight is dedicated to ensuring:

• Accuracy. Ratings must be accurate, fair, and trustworthy. When errors occur, there must be a straightforward and consistent process for correcting them.
• Ubiquity. Ratings should be available for nearly every significant organization across all industries, enabling comparison against industry and global benchmarks.
• Stability. Since significant changes in security posture take time, security ratings should be stable and free from rapid fluctuation.
• Comparability. Security ratings must allow meaningful comparison of performance between organizations. Ratings should also be comparable over time, allowing security teams to observe trends.
• Empiricism. Security ratings should be based on objective, verifiable data rather than subjective judgments and opinions. They should also be correlated with the risk of data breaches and predictive of financial performance.
• Transparency. Ratings should be intuitive, consistent, and easy to understand. It should be easy to see how ratings are affected by findings.

Why Bitsight Leads the Security Ratings Market

As the world’s leading security rating service, Bitsight transforms the way organizations approach cybersecurity and risk management. Bitsight tools for continuous monitoring and assessment – including attack surface monitoring, cyber risk monitoring, and cloud security monitoring – help organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about risk, information security requirements, and cybersecurity governance.

With 3,100+ customers worldwide, Bitsight is a partner to 20% of the world’s countries, 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms. The Bitsight platform is home to 25,000+ users sharing security ratings with more than 170,000 third-party organizations, making it the most widely used security ratings platform across all industries.

FAQs: What is Cybersecurity Governance?