4 Ways to Reduce Exposure and Manage Risk Across Your Expanding Digital Infrastructure

Digital infrastructure is the foundation of a modern, connected organization. It encompasses connectivity, cloud, compute, security, storage, applications, databases, IoT, remote networks, and more.

Once housed on premises, this infrastructure now extends across regions, offices, work-from-anywhere environments—and across the third-party providers who make digital transformation possible.

Securing this digital infrastructure is a growing challenge. Technology is accelerating rapidly and can be deployed faster than ever—often without the oversight of IT teams. At the same time, threat actors are continually evolving their tools and techniques to pierce your defenses and conduct nefarious activities.

Point security tools and practices are important, but to truly secure your digital infrastructure you need to view it holistically. 

Let’s look at 4 ways you can reduce exposure, improve performance, and manage risk.:

1. Gain greater visibility
2. Identify true cyber threats
3. Benchmark your cybersecurity
4. Monitor your supply chain

1. Gain visibility into your expanding digital infrastructure

The first step to securing your digital infrastructure is understanding its true extent and visualizing where cyber risks lie hidden.

The process usually involves taking manual inventory of all digital assets and running a bunch of security scans. But this is a time-consuming process that ignores the dynamic nature of your environment in which new assets are constantly being deployed and others retired. Shadow IT, such as SaaS applications acquired outside IT operations' ownership and control, can also remain undetected.

To better understand the scope of your organization’s connected digital infrastructure use Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. With attack surface monitoring, you can automatically and continuously gain ecosystem-wide views of your digital assets—even shadow IT.

A centralized dashboard shows the location of each asset—broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit—and the corresponding cyber risk associated with each.

You can also identify areas of concentrated risk. For example, if an AWS web application firewall in Virginia that shields prying eyes from sensitive financial data is misconfigured, you can move quickly to remediate the vulnerability.

2. Cut through the noise and focus on real threats

Agility is key to securing your digital infrastructure—and that means continuously monitoring emerging risks. Instead of drowning in a sea of alerts from disparate monitoring toolsets—and potentially missing something important—Bitsight continuously and automatically monitors your entire digital infrastructure.

No need to hunt down threats or verify whether they pose immediate risk. With Bitsight you’re alerted when new risks arise, such as misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, unpatched systems, and other risk factors that bad actors can exploit.  If a vulnerability exists, Bitsight will identify it and classify the associated risk so you can make educated, confident, data-driven decisions about where to focus your resources—while eliminating the risk posed by false positives and alert fatigue.
 

3. Learn where your cybersecurity falls short compared to your peers

For a truly holistic view of the security posture of your own digital infrastructure, look no further than others in your industry. Using Bitsight's benchmarking tools, you can understand how your cybersecurity performance compares to your competitors and peers.

With these benchmarks, you can improve your security program in previously impossible ways. For example, with Bitsight you can:

• Create performance improvement plans to strengthen your security program in the context of your peer group.
• Spur action in the C-suite by reporting on how your program aligns to or exceeds industry standard benchmarks.
• Let your prospects, customers, and investors know how your security practice sets you apart and that their data is safe and secure with you.

Read how Cornerstone Building Brands uses Bitsight to benchmark security performance against its industry peers and set achievable security goals based on relative performance within the context of a meaningful peer group.

4. Extend the same visibility to your supply chain

A significant challenge to reducing risk across your digital infrastructure is its interconnected nature—especially if you depend on third parties, such as software vendors and cloud service providers. Any upstream cyber risk or attack can quickly propagate across the supply chain, as happened with SolarWinds and many others. In fact:

• 62 percent of network intrusions originate from a third-party, often from someone in your software supply chain.
• 81 percent of organizations have experienced a cloud-related security incident in the past year, with 45 percent experiencing at least four incidents.

With more vendors entering your supply chain, you need to understand the cyber risk they pose—during onboarding and for the life of the contract.

Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) provides this visibility. It gives you an immediate, near real-time snapshot of your third parties’ security performance, from initial vendor evaluation through the life of the relationship. You’re alerted in near-real time the moment a new risk is detected. With this wide aperture, you can quickly determine whether a more in-depth security assessment is needed based on how critical the vendor is to your organization and allocate your limited resources more effectively.

With Bitsight, you can even continuously monitor fourth parties for a complete view of your extended attack surface. And should a major security event occur, Bitsight makes it easy to assess the impact across your supply chain and collaborate with your vendors to remediate risk and track responses—all from within a centralized dashboard.

BearingPoint is using Bitsight TPRM to understand and manage cyber risk in an expanding digital ecosystem. As David Perstl, the head of security, says: “With hundreds of thousands of assets on the internet and cloud instances being spun up every day, we needed visibility into where cybersecurity falls short—and Bitsight delivers that.” 

Gain complete visibility into cyber risk across your digital infrastructure

With the comprehensive insights that Bitsight delivers, you can achieve the otherwise impossible feat of seeing your digital infrastructure the way a hacker does. With this outside-in view of your organization’s security posture and your supply chain, you can reduce exposure, improve security performance, and manage risk.