Security Risk Assessment

Visualizing Risk With A Superior Security Risk Assessment

As data breaches continue to wreak havoc for companies large and small, security leaders are seeking better security risk assessment tools. Traditional on-site assessments tend to be costly and time-consuming, and they offer only a point-in-time snapshot of an organization’s security performance. To mitigate risk more effectively, you need data-driven security risk assessment solutions that can continuously monitor your security posture and provide insight into hidden risks in your digital ecosystem.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Rating Service provides a continuous measure of your organization’s security performance, enabling you to make better decisions about prioritizing resources for remediation. Additionally, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics provides clear visibility into your digital footprint, helping you identify significant areas of risk in your extended ecosystem.

The Limits Of Traditional Security Risk Assessments

Traditional solutions for information technology risk assessments are limited in several critical ways.

Lack of visibility

Your digital ecosystem is continually expanding. Whether it’s cloud services, mergers and acquisitions, or geographically dispersed business units, your corporate digital footprint has likely grown far beyond its usual perimeter. While this expansion may help to increase agility and competitiveness, it can also limit your visibility of critical digital assets and associated risks within these systems. Traditional cyber security risk assessment checklists and tools are often inadequate for visualizing and assessing risk outside of the traditional network perimeter or at a scale large enough to meet your growing ecosystem needs.

Insufficient context

To manage risk effectively and cost-efficiently, your security and risk management teams must allocate resources based on the criticality of assets and the severity of risk. Yet, as your digital footprint expands and visibility into risk becomes more difficult, your teams may lack the context required to make decisions about which assets are at greatest risk and how to prioritize remediation. As a result, teams may need to filter through massive amounts of data and multiple technology solutions to identify the most severe security events.

No common language

Risk management efforts are strongest when individuals and teams throughout an organization have a common understanding of security performance and cyber risk. Yet too often, traditional cyber security risk assessment reports offer no common language of KPIs, vulnerabilities, and issues that serve as a common frame of reference. As a result, it’s more difficult to determine whether your teams are using their resources effectively to deliver the greatest ROI.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight provides a suite of solutions that offer superior security risk assessment tools for organizations managing risk in an expanding digital ecosystem. Based on Bitsight’s independently verified Security Ratings, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics makes it simple for security and risk teams to quickly visualize the digital footprint of their organization, assess its security posture, and achieve measurable cyber risk reduction.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics enables you to:

• Visualize assets in your digital ecosystem. Bitsight delivers unprecedented insight into digital assets across your ecosystem. Rather than manually tracking asset inventory via spreadsheets, your teams can automatically discover vulnerabilities, determine where they’re located, and identify the risks associated with each exposure. Bitsight’s centralized dashboard breaks down the location of assets by cloud provider, geography, and business unit. Bitsight’s cyber security risk assessment matrix assesses the criticality and severity of issues affecting each end point so teams can get a complete picture of the risk.
• Prioritize cybersecurity efforts. Leveraging the power of the Bitsight platform, your security teams can overlay vulnerability insights with objective, quantifiable cybersecurity findings. This yields a better understanding of which groups and types of assets are at greatest risk and help security managers feel confident deciding which areas should receive priority remediation.
• Uncover shadow IT. Shadow IT – technology solutions procured by teams and individuals without the knowledge of your IT staff – represent a significant risk for your organization. Because these information assets are outside the control of your organization, your security managers will have little to no visibility into potential malware infections, security failures, and other weaknesses that can expose your organization to cyber risk. Bitsight helps you uncover instances of shadow IT, assess the risk they represent, and bring them in line with your corporate security policies.
• Monitor risk and cloud environments. Where traditional security risk assessments are difficult to scale for cloud environments, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics gives you continuous, broad visibility into your attack surface in the cloud. With Bitsight, you get a clear picture of the risk profile of all your cloud-hosted networks.

Bitsight Delivers An Objective Security Risk Assessment

Bitsight Security Ratings provide an objective, verifiable security risk assessment for your organization and your vendors. Providing broad visibility into your organization’s attack surface, Security Ratings deliver business context to help security teams make risk-based decisions about remediation. Security Ratings help also serve as a common indicator of an organization’s overall cybersecurity hygiene, helping to facilitate conversations about risk with executives and board members.

Bitsight Security Ratings are based on the analysis of externally observable data gathered from more than 120 sources. By continually scanning vast amounts of data, Bitsight issues daily ratings for hundreds of thousands of companies.

Bitsight Security Ratings measure the security performance of an organization by looking at data in four general categories: evidence of compromised systems, issues with security diligence, risky user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Using a proprietary algorithm to analyze and classify this information, Bitsight issues ratings that range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820. The higher the rating, the stronger the company’s security posture, and the more unlikely they are to experience an impact data breach to their network. Bitsight ratings also help to set security benchmarks that provide a quantified baseline and enable security teams to measure performance against industry peers.

Why Choose Bitsight For Security Risk Assessment?

Bitsight transforms how organizations manage and monitor security performance. By enabling more complete security visibility and evaluating how well an attack surface is protected from cyber security threats, Bitsight helps to improve an organization’s cybersecurity posture and manage risk more effectively.

Founded in 2011, Bitsight has become the leading Security Rating Service and is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to provide a clear picture of their security posture. Bitsight’s 3,000 customers include 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms. Additionally, 20 percent of the world’s countries trust Bitsight to protect national security, and 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Bitsight to more efficiently manage risk.

FAQs: What Is A Security Risk Assessment?