Cybersecurity Risk Assessment

Identifying risk with a cybersecurity risk assessment

Cyber threats today are constantly evolving and new vulnerabilities are continually emerging. To improve security posture, organizations must take steps to continuously monitor risk, assess and remediate vulnerabilities, and track security performance. However, this task is increasingly difficult as digital ecosystems expand and become more complex. Most companies lack complete visibility into their growing digital footprint, making a comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessment virtually impossible. Without the ability to visualize all the assets in their digital ecosystem, security teams are unable to assess risk and prioritize remediation to protect the organization from devastating attacks like ransomware.

Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading security ratings platform, Bitsight provides organizations with broad visibility into the attack surface. Bitsight also offers invaluable and unmatched context that can help security leaders make risk-based decisions about remediation and program investments through continuous cybersecurity risk assessments.

The hidden risk in expanding ecosystems

As organizations embrace digital transformation and cloud services, security teams find it difficult to achieve and sustain a strong security posture for several key reasons.

Lack of visibility

Security teams can’t secure what they can’t see. From the cloud, to mergers and acquisitions, and geographically dispersed business units, the corporate digital footprint is constantly growing and changing beyond previously established perimeters. The complexity of modern IT environments makes it difficult for security managers to gain a complete view of risk, both overall and in specific vectors, with their cybersecurity risk assessments.

Lack of context

Security and risk teams are constantly dealing with limited budgets and resources. To prioritize remediation and make the most of available resources, security teams need cybersecurity risk assessment tools that can assess the criticality and level of risk associated with each asset. Yet most teams lack the ability to quantify risk in business terms and identify severe vulnerabilities without filtering through massive amounts of data.

Lack of common language

To gain the greatest impact from available resources, security teams must be on the same page with risk managers, executives, and the Board of Directors when it comes to assessing risk and prioritizing remediation. However, most organizations lack a common language for discussing KPIs, vulnerabilities, and the findings of cyber security assessments. Too often, this leads to confusion and an inability to come to agreement about the greatest risks facing the organization and how to remediate them.

To address these challenges, Bitsight offers a suite of solutions that delivers unprecedented visibility, detailed context, and metrics that provide a common language around security and risk.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides solutions for cybersecurity risk assessments that help organizations visualize risk throughout their expanding ecosystem and take swift action to improve cybersecurity posture.

Bitsight Security Ratings are based on independent, objective, and externally verifiable data. Bitsight’s ratings are derived from information collected from 120+ sources concerning 25 key risk vectors in areas like compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. Using a proprietary algorithm, Bitsight analyzes and categorizes this data to produce a daily security rating that indicates an organization’s overall security posture.

Bitsight ratings provide security teams with invaluable insight into the security performance of their organization as well as vendors in their third-party network. Bitsight ratings help security teams uncover vulnerabilities, prioritize remediation efforts, benchmark security performance, and mitigate risk posed by third-party relationships. Ratings also provide a common and easily understood language for communicating the effectiveness of security programs with key stakeholders, including executive leadership and the Board of Directors.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

The robust data set that produces Bitsight’s Security Ratings also delivers much-needed visibility into an organization’s attack surface. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, part of the Bitsight platform, enables security teams to conduct ongoing cybersecurity risk assessments to quickly validate their digital footprint, assess security performance, mitigate risk exposure, and enhance security posture.

Visualize assets throughout the digital ecosystem

Bitsight provides a centralized dashboard that shows the location of digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit, and more. Bitsight also quantifies the risk associated with each asset.

Discover shadow IT

Bitsight reveals instances of shadow IT, the technology solutions procured or spun up by teams and individuals without the evaluation and approval of IT. Bitsight assesses these technologies for risk and brings them into line with corporate security policies.

Streamline reporting

Bitsight makes it easy to communicate security performance to executives, Board members, and other individuals who may not have background knowledge in cybersecurity. Bitsight Executive Reports allows security professionals to quickly pull business-centric metrics and reports using built-in templates with cyber security policy examples. Users can also create custom reports that show security performance at a high level, or with granular detail.

Why Bitsight?

Founded in 2011, Bitsight has become the world’s leading Security Ratings Service by providing ratings that help organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about risk management and cybersecurity policy. Based on objective, verifiable cybersecurity data, Bitsight Security Ratings provide a dynamic measurement of the security posture of an organization and its vendors. By continuously monitoring large sets of cybersecurity data, Bitsight generates daily security ratings for hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide.

Bitsight’s 2,100 customers include 25% of Fortune 500 companies and 20% of the world’s countries. Bitsight is also the choice of 4 of the top 5 investment banks, all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms, and 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers.