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What is a cybersecurity KPI dashboard?
A cybersecurity KPI dashboard displays high-level information about an organization’s security posture and level of cyber risk.
Cybersecurity KPI dashboards are especially effective at communicating risk to executives and Board members, helping them to make smarter and well-informed decisions about funding and resources for cybersecurity programs. Cybersecurity KPI dashboards summarize program performance in one view to make it easy to compare program performance over time.
The value of a cybersecurity KPI dashboard
A cybersecurity KPI dashboard is an essential tool for security and risk professionals as they seek to remediate risk and improve the security posture of their organization. Dashboards are an effective way of communicating with leadership on the Board and in the C-suite, boiling down volumes of technical details into easy-to-understand metrics that can facilitate data-driven conversations about risk and security.
As part of its industry-leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight offers reporting tools and dashboards that can help security and risk teams share the most important KPIs with leadership quickly and easily.
Choosing KPIs for a cybersecurity dashboard
Choosing metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard or cyber security presentation can be a high-stakes exercise. The right KPIs can help executives and Board members clearly understand the risks facing the organization and gain their support for budgets and programs. On the other hand, KPIs that are too technical or confusing can derail discussions or fail to gain traction.
These criteria can help you decide whether a KPI is helpful for any information security presentation:
Is it accurate and important?
Metrics that have large margins of error or rely too heavily on guesswork make ineffective KPIs. Metrics that focus on insignificant areas of cybersecurity only take up space in conversation and are not helpful.
Will it be understood by individuals with non-technical backgrounds?
Many executives and Board members don’t have the background to interpret highly technical cybersecurity metrics. When sharing a cybersecurity KPI dashboard with these individuals, it’s best to stick with metrics that easily tie into business success without a detailed explanation.
Can it be calculated quickly and easily?
The most important KPIs should be checked often in order to monitor their progress over time. Cyber security information that requires hours to export, manipulate, and calculate will be difficult to include in regular reports and dashboards.
Important metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard
Here are examples of at-a-glance metrics Bitsight can provide for your cybersecurity KPI dashboard.
- Bitsight Security Rating – indicates overall security performance and correlates to the likelihood of a data breach.
- Botnet infection grade – based on the frequency, severity, and duration of botnet infections.
- Peer-to-peer filesharing grade – indicates how much P2P activity took place on a network within the last 60 days and compares that performance to other organizations.
- Open port grade – shows how well-sealed an organization’s network is by comparing the number of open ports to other organizations.
- Average vendor security rating over time – reveals whether third-party risk management programs are meeting an organization’s security requirements.
- Average industry security rating – provides context for an organization’s own cybersecurity performance.
- Patching cadence grade – identifies how long it takes security teams to apply critical security patches on average, compared to other organizations.
The Bitsight Security Ratings platform
The Bitsight platform is the most widely used Security Ratings service in the world. As a data-driven and dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance, Bitsight’s daily ratings provide near-real-time visibility into risk within an organization’s digital footprint and supply chain.
Bitsight provides both an overall rating of an organization’s security posture and grades that offer granular detail about security performance related to 23 key risk vectors. This data serves as the foundation for a suite of solutions that can help security teams mitigate risk, improve security posture, and communicate clearly with everyone in the organization. Bitsight Security Ratings provide data for security performance management, third-party cyber risk assessments, cloud security audits, and other data-driven initiatives.
Bitsight offers several solutions that provide helpful metrics and organization for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics
To deliver greater visibility into your expanding digital ecosystem, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics provides a dashboard that reveals where all assets are located and what risks they represent. This centralized, cybersecurity KPI dashboard shows assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit and assesses the corresponding risk that each asset presents. Security teams can overlay assets with objective, quantifiable cybersecurity insights on the Bitsight platform. This can improve understanding of which groups and types of assets are properly secured, and which ones represent the greatest potential for cyber risk.
Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking
Bitsight’s security benchmarking solution helps show the impact of security programs over time. By providing a quantified baseline and comparative data, this solution enables teams to measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to industry peers, and communicate KPIs to executives and the Board.
Bitsight Executive Reports
Bitsight’s reporting capabilities make security performance efficient to understand and discuss with the Board and C-Suite to drive more productive conversations about cyber risk. With Bitsight Executive Reports, security and risk professionals can quickly pull easy-to-understand metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard. Readily available reports and templates with cybersecurity executive summary examples help risk managers develop presentations quickly, and users can easily customize reports to provide KPIs for specific audiences.
Why manage security KPIs with Bitsight?
Bitsight was founded in 2011 and has been a pioneer in the security ratings industry for the past decade. Today, Bitsight is trusted by some of the largest organizations in the world to deliver a clear picture of their security performance. By enabling complete security visibility that shows how well an organization’s attack surface and vendors are protected against cybersecurity threats, Bitsight helps to improve security posture and manage third-party risk more effectively.
The Bitsight is the most widely adopted security ratings platform in the world. Among Bitsight’s 2,100 customers are 20% of the world’s countries, 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 7 of top 10 largest cyber insurers, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.
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