Security Benchmarks

Optimizing Security With Benchmarking

While benchmarking has helped improve performance in many areas of business, most cybersecurity teams have been unable to take advantage of this powerful tool. The reason: security benchmarks require more than the traditional metrics with point-in-time assessments, subjective judgments, or highly technical KPIs. To reap the value of security benchmarking, security teams need tools that provide continuous, objective, easily understood metrics that offer an externally comparative view of cybersecurity performance over time.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking offer a continuous, data-driven measure of security performance, allowing businesses to establish a quantified baseline and comparative data. With Bitsight, organizations can benchmark their security performance on a wide set of actionable metrics.

The Value Of Security Benchmarks

Security ratings provide a baseline that organizations can use to measure their cybersecurity performance across business units and against competitors and peers. By tracking ratings over time and comparing them to the ratings of other companies, security leaders and risk managers can establish security benchmarks that reveal where their organization or department stands.

With security benchmarks, organizations can:

• Improve cybersecurity planning. Benchmarking helps teams set concrete performance goals and eliminate vague objectives about “increasing security” or “enhancing security architecture.” With measurable, verifiable metrics, security teams can take clear action and justify requests for resources.
• Monitor progress. Security benchmarks make it clear where companies need to improve security practices and let teams track changes over time. Benchmarking facilitates cyber risk analytics and the tasks of remediating the most critical security issues and refocusing overall IT strategy.
• Improve reporting. Armed with actionable security benchmarks, IT leaders can more effectively communicate with executives and the board. With simplified metrics like security ratings, IT leaders and executives can have more productive conversations about cyber risk management and what resources are required to improve it. Cyber security reports that compare performance to competitors and peers can help decision-makers understand the need for investment in key areas of security.
• Justify budgets. Security benchmarks help IT leaders present information to demonstrate the ROI of cybersecurity investments and how security programs can support business goals.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight Security Ratings offer a data-driven measure of the security performance of an organization and its vendors. Bitsight’s ratings are derived from objective, externally observable and verifiable information and provide a score – from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – that indicates how effective a company is at implementing good security controls.

Bitsight continually analyzes, evaluates, and monitors the security posture of thousands of companies using externally observable data. Ratings are updated daily, and Bitsight issues alerts when a company’s rating changes significantly.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking give security leaders visibility into a wealth of risk vector data on their own company as well as their vendors and peers. With security benchmarks from Bitsight, organizations can measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to peers, and communicate KPIs to the board.

The Benefits of Bitsight’s Security Benchmarking Technology

Security and risk leaders can use Bitsight’s security benchmarking technology to achieve measurable improvement in security programs. Bitsight enables security teams to:

• Identify issues. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform delivers actionable metrics on compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed breaches for companies and their peers. With this data, security leaders can better understand diligence standards across the industry and gain insight into industry-specific threats.
• Communicate performance. Bitsight simplifies communication with C-suite leaders and the board. Security and risk managers can share KPIs with historical and industry context to help demonstrate program improvements and advocate for increased resources.
• Compare to peers. With Bitsight you can compare your score and performance to peers and competitors in the same industry or of similar company size to understand how you’re performing relative to averages.
• Strengthen reputation. Superior risk management can be a business advantage and differentiator. Organizations with successful security programs can use benchmarking to demonstrate achievements and progress.
• Run detailed forensics. With Bitsight’s actionable forensics package, security leaders can identify infections on the company’s network and provide detailed specifics (including destination URLs, destination IPs, location, timestamp, and more) that allow security teams to successfully remediate potentially harmful threats.

Why set security benchmarks with Bitsight?

In 2011, Bitsight pioneered the security ratings market with an outside-in model for security ratings. Today, Bitsight is the world’s leading security ratings service, serving 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 20% of the world’s countries, 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, and 4 of the top 5 investment banks. Through continuous monitoring and assessment – including attack surface monitoring, cyber risk monitoring, and cloud security monitoring – Bitsight helps organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and third-party risk.

Bitsight’s leadership in the Security Ratings industry is built on three pillars:

• Visibility. Bitsight offers more complete and unique visibility into existing and emerging areas of risk. Bitsight is the only Security Rating Service provider with a third-party validated correlation to breach.
• Engaged community. Bitsight offers the most robust community of cyber risk interactions. The Bitsight platform hosts over 3,000 Bitsight customers as they share security ratings with more than 170,000 third-party organizations, making Bitsight the most widely used security ratings platform across all industries.
• Prioritization and context. Bitsight offers an easy, visual way to prioritize and collaborate internally and externally to address the largest areas of risk. By calculating importance in a more diversified way, Bitsight ensures that the most critical assets are ranked higher.

FAQs: What are security benchmarks?