Security Benchmarking

Optimizing programs with security benchmarking

The practice of benchmarking has been an invaluable tool for businesses as they seek to improve performance in sales, profits, productivity, and marketing effectiveness. Yet, most organizations have been unable to employ benchmarking to enhance security performance.

There’s a simple reason for this: benchmarking requires clear, simple, quantifiable metrics that teams track and compare over time. Traditionally, teams measure security performance with highly technical cyber security information or point-in-time indicators that don’t deliver the clarity or continuous measurements benchmarking requires. A continuous, data-driven measure of security benchmarking enables companies to easily assess and monitor cybersecurity posture, measure the impact of mitigation efforts, and benchmark performance against peers.

The benefits of security benchmarking

With quantitative and objective data about the effectiveness of your security programs, you can easily benchmark security performance to measure progress over time and compare your performance to peers and competitors. Bitsight has seen proven success in security benchmarking for organizations both large and small to deliver significant benefits for security teams. The security benchmarking capabilities offered by Bitsight helps companies to:

Optimize performance

By benchmarking and monitoring metrics over time, you can identify specific areas for improvement and track progress toward specific goals with greater clarity.

Improve reporting

Communicating security performance with the Board and C-suite is often challenging, as the metrics in a cybersecurity KPI dashboard are often highly technical and difficult understand. With simple metrics such as botnet infections and number of open ports, security benchmarking makes it easier to develop information security presentations that show progress in terms that people without an IT background can understand.

Justify resources

Too often, senior leadership views IT security as a cost center rather than an area that supports business growth. Security benchmarking can help shift the focus on your security programs away from cost and toward strategic initiatives that support a company’s competitive edge.

Evaluate tools

The specificity of Bitsight’s benchmarking data makes it easy to evaluate the effectiveness of cybersecurity programs by tracking performance with and without specific technologies and controls.

Maintain competitiveness

With benchmarks that provide comparisons to industry peers, you can understand quickly how your security programs stack up and where you’re falling behind or outpacing competitors.

Set actionable goals

Benchmarking security programs allows you to set actionable goals instead of theoretical ones. Rather than general objectives around reducing risk, you can establish goals to make progress on specific metrics within a certain timeframe.

The advantages of security benchmarking with Bitsight

Bitsight offers clear benefits for security and risk leaders.

Proactively identify security issues

Security benchmarking with Bitsight provides clear insight into compromised systems, user behavior risks, and security diligence within industry peers. This intelligence makes it easier to understand which infections are targeting peers and competitors, delivering insight into industry-specific threats and security diligence standards throughout your industry. Bitsight Security Ratings address all areas of security performance and helps security teams manage a cloud security audit as you move more resources to the cloud.

Improve reputational risk management

Bitsight benchmarking lets you use security as a competitive advantage, demonstrating the progress of your security programs for customers, investors, and partners.

Remediate issues with detailed forensics

Bitsight’s actionable Forensics package shows infections observed on your network in great detail, delivering the specifics your security teams need to remediate potentially harmful issues.

Justify security investments

Bitsight’s reporting capabilities make it easy to communicate security metrics to executive leadership and the Board in clear cyber security presentations, documenting security performance in relation to peers and competitors. By documenting the impact of security programs, you can more easily justify investments and advocate for increased cybersecurity resources. Bitsight’s reporting tools enable you to quickly develop custom reports or to take advantage of readily available reports, templates, and cybersecurity executive summary examples.

Why Bitsight

Bitsight has pioneered the security ratings industry since its founding in 2011. Providing a dynamic measurement of cybersecurity posture, Bitsight enables organizations to benchmark and improve their own security performance while managing risk more effectively throughout their supply chain.

Bitsight Security Ratings are based on objective, externally verifiable metrics such as compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Collecting data from 120+ sources concerning 23 risk vectors, Bitsight provides daily ratings for hundreds of thousands of organizations. By enabling more complete security visibility and benchmarking how well an organization is protected against cybersecurity threats, Bitsight helps security leaders to make faster, more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and risk management.