What is Security Posture?
An organization’s security posture is its readiness and ability to identify, respond to and recover from security threats and risks. All cybersecurity efforts and investments contribute to security posture, meaning security strategy, policy, technology, procedures, controls, training, and security reporting are all part of building a strong security posture.
The True Meaning and Value of Security Posture
As cybercrime continues to proliferate, organizations are heavily focused on their security posture and attack surface – meaning their readiness to stop threats, mitigate risk, and respond to cyberattacks. A strong security posture reduces the likelihood of a successful breach, while a weak posture suggests the presence of vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited by attackers.
What really makes security posture meaningful, however, is the that it targets cybersecurity budgets and focuses cybersecurity planning. With a clear understanding of your security posture, your security and risk leaders can identify areas of acceptable risk and direct resources to remediate them. Conversations with executives and board members can be driven by security posture, meaning security leaders have more clarity in the data and metrics they offer to support findings and justify efforts.
Identifying and managing security posture requires clear visibility into the risks and threats within your digital ecosystem as well as the performance of security programs designed to address them. For companies seeking tools to heighten and maintain proper security posture, Bitsight provides solutions built on the world’s leading Security Ratings platform.
The Challenge of Security Visibility in Today’s IT Environment
Your organization’s security posture refers to your ability to recognize threats and your readiness to mitigate them or recover from an attack. Everything related to security helps to determine your security posture, meaning your security plans, strategies, policies, technologies, controls, communications, and training all play a role in shaping security posture. Your organization’s ability to maintain a strong cybersecurity posture through regular maintenance and program care even when I direct threat isn’t necessarily present is also indicative of strong security posture.
Because security posture is a dynamic and evolving measurement of your approach to security, managing it requires tools that deliver continuous metrics about the risk in your digital systems and the performance of your security programs.
There are two principal challenges in accurately assessing security posture.
- Attack surfaces for most organizations are rapidly changing and expanding. From acquisitions and new technologies to vendor ecosystems and the burgeoning use of remote/home networks, your attack surface is likely growing quickly and in ways that make it difficult to identify and evaluate risk. Greater security visibility is essential to understanding the threats you face and how well you’re positioned to address them.
- Many metrics for identifying risk and analyzing performance are often unhelpful to shaping security posture, meaning they are too vague, lacking in context, or not continuously available. Finding solutions that can deliver a continuous stream of targeted metrics in context is critical to evaluating the performance of security programs and shaping efforts to improve them.
The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides metrics and tools that allow security teams to easily overcome these obstacles and effectively measure and manage their organization’s security posture.
Bitsight Security Ratings
Security ratings are a data-driven, objective, and dynamic measurement of an organization’s security performance. Thousands of organizations around the world use Bitsight Security Ratings to improve their security posture and make more effective security decisions.
Security ratings provide a comprehensive, outside-in view of a company’s overall cybersecurity posture. Similar to the way credit ratings are developed, Bitsight ratings are based on externally observable data rather than information provided by organizations themselves. Bitsight Security Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – higher ratings indicate a stronger overall security posture, while lower ratings suggest an organization is more susceptible to breach.
Bitsight’s ratings are based on observable data from hundreds of sources categorized into four areas: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Bitsight weights this data according to the risk it presents to the organization and uses a proprietary algorithm to calculate a rating.
Bitsight is the only security ratings service whose ratings have been independently verified to correlate to breach. Companies with a Bitsight security rating of 500 or lower, for instance, are nearly five times more likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 700 or higher. If organizations believe their rating should be different, Bitsight also has an established way to handle any ratings dispute and provide organizations a fair way to make a logical case for a rating change if they believe their security posture isn’t accurately represented.
Enhancing Security Posture with Bitsight
Bitsight Security Ratings can play a pivotal role in assessing security posture by evaluating risk within an organization’s IT environment as well as its vendor ecosystem. Bitsight offers a suite of solutions to monitor, measure, and manage risk.
- Bitsight for Security Performance Management. Bitsight helps security and risk leaders take a risk-based, outcome-driven approach to managing their organization’s cybersecurity performance. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning forecasting, security teams can measurably reduce cyber risk and improve security posture. Bitsight directly demonstrates how cybersecurity investments are affecting security posture and helps teams allocate limited resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk. Bitsight also facilitates data-driven conversations about cybersecurity among key stakeholders.
- Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management. While traditional methods for managing third-party risk rely on manual, subjective, and periodic assessments, Bitsight provides continuous monitoring to help risk teams constantly quantify cyber risk of third parties and scale third-party risk management programs. Bitsight ratings provide a simple snapshot of a vendor’s security posture and allows risk teams to track vendor performance over time. Bitsight ratings also make it easier to collaborate with vendors and develop remediation plans or set security performance standards in contracts.
- Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. Bitsight provides clear visibility into your expanding attack surface. A centralized dashboard shows the location of your digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit, along with the corresponding cyber risk. With Bitsight, security teams can discover hidden assets and shadow IT, or visualize areas of concentrated risk to determine the highest areas of exposure and prioritize remediation efforts.
- Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking. Bitsight enables organizations to benchmark security performance and posture against industry peers and competitors. With Bitsight, you can measure the impact of risk mitigation efforts and provide meaningful cyber risk reports to executives and boards.
Why Manage Security Posture with Bitsight?
Bitsight was founded in 2011 to transform how companies manage information security risk. As the world’s leading security reporting service, Bitsight delivers actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks by continuously monitoring large pools of objective and independently verified data. By delivering complete security visibility and evaluating the risk in attack surfaces and third-party networks, Bitsight helps to improve cybersecurity posture and manage risk more efficiently and effectively.
Bitsight is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations and governments to give them a clear picture of their security posture. Bitsight’s 2,100 customers include 20% of the world’s countries, 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all of the Big 4 accounting firms.