Digital Resilience

The keys to achieving digital resilience

Faced with greater exposure and more sophisticated cyberattacks, it is no longer possible for IT organizations to “prevent” cyber breaches. Shifting focus towards digital resilience enables teams to thrive against greater exposure. In contract to security programs that are dedicated to using cyber threat intelligence to prevent threats, digital resilience efforts help organizations bounce back from an attack as quickly as possible. A focus on cyber resilience empowers organizations to build stronger cybersecurity programs, protect assets, and thrive in a constantly evolving threat landscape.

For IT teams seeking solutions to improve digital resilience, Bitsight offers industry-leading tools that enable continuous monitoring of security performance and third-party risk. With Bitsight, simplify and automate the process of evaluating security controls, improving security hygiene, and mitigating risk within your supply chain to create a more resilient security posture.

Strategies for improving resilience

Practicing digital resilience is often a matter of adopting the right tools and strategies to maintain a proactive approach to risk management.

Monitor patching cadence

Maintaining a regular patching cadence is essential for addressing potential security vulnerabilities and protecting your networks and applications. Technology that identifies unpatched systems is instrumental in identifying the ideal cadence for patching software to reduce risk and improve security. In fact, poor patching cadence is correlated to a higher likelihood of ransomware risk.

Continuously monitor third-party risk

Despite your best security efforts, cyberattacks originating with third-party vendors threaten your own cybersecurity. Monitoring the security posture of your vendors is essential, but traditional methods like annual assessments provide only a point-in-time snapshot of a vendor’s security program. With tools for continuous monitoring, you are immediately alerted when there are changes in a vendor’s security posture or when holes in their security programs may create risk for your organization as well.

Get buy-in from leadership

The support of senior management is critical to the success of security initiatives designed to build digital resilience. To convince board members and business leaders of the importance of a resilient security posture, you’ll need to share key cyber resilience metrics and present data in a way that’s easy to understand and digest, as board members and executives may lack the technical background to decipher complex security data and risk metrics.

Managing digital resilience with Bitsight

Bitsight helps companies make better, faster decisions about cyber risk. With solutions for monitoring security performance, managing third-party risk, and performing cyber risk quantification, we help to improve cybersecurity posture and mitigate risk more efficiently.

Bitsight solutions are based on our industry-leading Security Ratings. Bitsight Ratings provide an objective, outside-in view of your organization’s security posture as well as the risk within your supply chain. By summarizing security and risk-related data in real time, Bitsight Ratings offer a trusted way to make impactful security performance decisions.

Bitsight provides several solutions that can help you build digital resilience.

• Security Performance Monitoring (SPM). Bitsight SPM continuously assesses an organization’s security performance over time. With visibility of an organization’s extended digital footprint, SPM monitors the effectiveness of security controls to streamline program management decisions. By leveraging meaningful metrics and contextualizing cybersecurity performance over time, Bitsight helps guide organizations in efforts to reduce cyber risk and enhance digital resilience.
• Third-Party Risk Management. Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) measures and continuously monitors third-party security controls across new and existing vendors. This Bitsight solution enables your teams to validate vendor security performance and ensure new vendors are within your organization’s risk tolerance. Capabilities for continuous controls monitoring mitigate risk throughout the vendor lifecycle and reduce time required to reassess vendors. Clear, evidence-based data provides stakeholders with better awareness and understanding of risk as well as the actions required to improve digital resilience.
• Vendor Risk Management. Bitsight Vendor Risk Management (VRM) helps to manage vendor risk from procurement all the way through the vendor relationship. To conduct faster, more strategic vendor assessments, this Bitsight solution automates processes while prioritizing critical and high-risk vendor assessments with customized workflows. Access to 20,000+ existing vendor security profiles accelerate assessment efforts, while a process powered by Bitsight’s best-in-class security ratings enables risk teams to make better decisions about digital resilience.

How Bitsight security ratings are calculated

Similar to a credit score, Bitsight Security Ratings range in value from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with higher ratings equating to better cybersecurity performance. Ratings are based on externally observable data collected from over 100 sources and over 250 billion events each day. Bitsight automatically maps data points to organizations, distilling trillions of data points into understandable risk categories.

Bitsight Ratings evaluate security performance in four broad areas: evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and public disclosures concerning breaches and interruptions to business continuity. After weighting, analyzing, and filtering data, Bitsight calculates daily security ratings that represent an accurate picture of an organization’s security posture. Letter grades provide an understanding of how a company is performing in each risk vector.

By continuously monitoring security ratings for their company as well as third-party vendors, security and risk teams can more effectively refine security controls and address risk within supply chains to create a more resilient security posture.

Why Bitsight?

Bitsight transforms how companies manage cyber risk. Founded in 2011, Bitsight created cybersecurity ratings to help companies measure the effectiveness of their security programs. Today, some of the world’s largest organizations trust Bitsight to help them manage their own security performance, improve third-party risk management, conduct financial diligence, and assess aggregate risk.

Bitsight customers include 20% of Fortune 500 companies, and 50% of global cyber insurance premiums are written by Bitsight customers. Over 120 government institutions across 30 countries rely on Bitsight to improve security performance and to manage critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Bitsight is the choice of 4 of the top 5 investment banks for vendor risk management, and all 4 of the big 4 accounting firms trust Bitsight as well.