Cybersecurity Performance Management

A new era of cybersecurity performance management

Cybersecurity-related risk is now rated as the second highest source of risk for the enterprise. The stakes are enormous: a cybersecurity breach can result in significant financial harm, damage to reputation, loss of customers’ trust, and loss of data and intellectual property.

Cybersecurity performance management solutions help your organization drive accountability for security outcomes and align investments and actions with the highest measurable impact over time. Ideally, your security performance management program should enable security and risk leaders to efficiently allocate limited resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk. Yet, traditional methods for managing risk and monitoring performance have relied on penetration testing, cyber threat intelligence, and periodic security assessments. These methods only include point-in-time metrics that can’t provide a continuous view of how security programs are performing.

Bitsight offers a modern, more effective way to develop your cyber risk strategy and manage security performance. Bitsight for Security Performance Management (SPM) enables continuous monitoring of security performance through daily security ratings that offer clear, objective, data-driven measurements.

How security ratings work

CIOs, CISOs, and other security and risk leaders are constantly required to answer critical security questions:

• How secure is the organization?
• Is security improving over time?
• Are investments in cybersecurity paying off?
• Is the company more or less secure than industry peers?

To answer these questions, security teams have traditionally relied on periodic audits, assessments, and legacy benchmarking methods to quantify cyber risk and measure the effectiveness of security controls. These security analytics often require a great deal of time to aggregate complex metrics, yet the point-in-time results they produce are outdated almost immediately.

Security ratings provide an alternative way to manage cybersecurity performance and to communicate risk to senior executives and board members in a way that’s easy to understand. Security ratings are based on externally observable and verifiable data that’s collected and analyzed daily. Unlike security assessment tools that review a company’s policies or conduct periodic scans, security ratings are based on objective evidence of an organization’s compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. The result is an objective, evidence-based measure of performance that provides clear insight into the effectiveness of security programs and controls.

Armed with daily ratings, you can proactively identify, quantify, and manage cybersecurity risk throughout your ecosystem. Security ratings provide a common language that can be appreciated by both technical and non-technical individuals, facilitating conversations between cybersecurity professionals and executives and board members to improve decision-making around security investments.

Assess cybersecurity performance with Bitsight

Bitsight Security Performance Management makes it easier to build a security program that best fits your risk tolerance and organizational objectives. Providing continuous visibility of your extended digital footprint, SPM facilitates cyber risk oversight and continuously monitors the effectiveness of your security controls. Combining meaningful KPIs with analytical insights, Bitsight simplifies, streamlines, and dramatically improves cybersecurity performance management.

With SPM, your security and risk teams can:

• Monitor the effectiveness of security programs on a daily basis, rather than at specific points in time throughout the year.
• Create and facilitate uniform performance targets across your organization.
• Provide in-depth comparisons of your organization’s cybersecurity performance management against peers.
• Communicate performance metrics to non-technical stakeholders while also providing meaningful context.
• Streamline program management decisions, including decisions around ongoing remediation of security controls.
• Determine the likelihood of a cybersecurity attack on specific business units or geographies.

In addition to SPM, Bitsight offers solutions to manage third-party risk, complementing vendor risk assessments with continuous monitoring to strengthen IT vendor risk management.

Benefits for cybersecurity performance management

Continuous visibility

Unlike traditional assessments and security audits, Bitsight for SPM enables your teams to see what’s working and what isn’t on a daily basis.

Accurate metrics

Bitsight enables you to track progress over time, setting goals and prioritizing different parts of your program while determining the effectiveness of your investments.

Manage third-party risk

Bitsight security ratings can help your teams decide whether to work with vendors, M&A targets, insurance applicants, integration partners, and other third parties based on the level of cybersecurity risk they represent.

Resource allocation

By combining data from security ratings with recent cybersecurity audits, you can effectively determine which parts of your program need resources and investment immediately. Continuous monitoring capabilities enable you to prioritize resources more accurately, focusing on investments that will quickly yield the greatest results.

Data-driven benchmarking

Bitsight provides ratings on over 140,000 organizations, enabling you to easily compare your own cybersecurity performance management efforts to hundreds or thousands of competitors and peers.

Intuitive reports

Bitsight security ratings are as easy to understand as a credit score, enabling board members and executives to immediately get a handle on the organization’s cybersecurity performance. Bitsight ratings also provide the data analytics and cybersecurity reporting capabilities that can help your security teams to justify of investments in cybersecurity performance management and demonstrate the measurable improvements that your programs achieve.

Why trust Bitsight?

Bitsight transforms how companies monitor security performance and handle third-party risk management. As the world’s leading Security Rating Service, Bitsight enables organizations to enhance cybersecurity performance and to improve risk management throughout the vendor lifecycle. Through continuous monitoring and assessment – including attack surface monitoring, cyber risk monitoring, and cloud security monitoring – Bitsight helps organizations make faster and more strategic decisions on matters of risk and security.

Bitsight has over 2,400 customers worldwide including the top 5 investment banks and all of the Big 4 accounting firms. Bitsight is also trusted by 120 government institutions, and 20% of Fortune 1000 companies use Bitsight to improve security performance.