Continuous Controls Monitoring

What is continuous controls monitoring?

Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) is the ongoing, automated process of collecting and analyzing data about an organization’s security and compliance controls to verify that they are operating effectively and as intended, in near real time. By instrumenting key processes—such as access provisioning, configuration management, change management and security policy enforcement—CCM turns periodic, snapshot-based testing into a dynamic, continuous assessment, enabling rapid detection of control failures or deviations and driving faster remediation.

At its core, CCM leverages automated tools and data feeds—such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), identity management systems, configuration management databases and cloud-native APIs—to continuously validate that controls (both technical and procedural) meet defined policies and risk thresholds.

Rather than waiting for quarterly or annual audits, CCM provides security and risk teams with up-to-date evidence of control effectiveness, alerting on exceptions such as unauthorized configuration changes, access policy violations or failed patch deployments. This real-time insight reduces blind spots across the extended attack surface, aligns operations with compliance mandates and drives a measurable uptick in security posture. 

Benefits of continuous controls monitoring

Continuous controls monitoring delivers several key advantages for security and risk professionals:

• Proactive risk management: CCM transforms controls from static checkboxes into dynamic sensors. Teams can detect and remediate control gaps—such as misconfigurations or policy violations—as they occur, rather than months later.
• Reduced audit effort: By automating evidence collection and generating dashboards of control performance, CCM minimizes manual testing and documentation, lowering audit costs and freeing up scarce security resources.
• Improved compliance posture: Continuous validation of regulatory and internal policy requirements (e.g., PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2) ensures controls remain aligned with changing standards, helping organizations stay inspection-ready.
• Enhanced visibility and reporting: Real-time control metrics and exception analytics give CISOs, GRC leaders and auditors a single pane of glass to understand control health, trends over time and remediation progress.
• Faster remediation cycles: Automated alerts and workflow integrations ensure that control failures feed directly into ticketing or orchestration platforms, accelerating fix-times and shrinking mean time to repair (MTTR).

Continuous controls monitoring framework

A robust CCM program typically comprises five integrated phases:

Define control objectives

Translate risk appetite and compliance requirements into specific, measurable control objectives (for example, “all internet-facing servers must have critical patches deployed within seven days”).

Map and instrument controls

Identify data sources—like vulnerability scanners, endpoint management systems or identity directories—and deploy agents or API connectors to collect relevant telemetry continuously.

Monitor and detect

Use analytics and rule engines to process incoming data streams, flagging exceptions when controls fall out of compliance (e.g., unexpected privilege escalations or unauthorized network changes).

Report and visualize

Surface control health metrics and exception trends through dashboards and executive reports, providing stakeholders with contextualized insights aligned to business units, geographies or risk domains.

Remediate and optimize

Integrate CCM alerts with SOAR or IT service management platforms to automate ticket creation, assign remediation tasks and track closure metrics. Feed post-incident reviews back into control design to continuously refine policies and thresholds.

The importance of continuous controls monitoring

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) suggests that implementing recommended critical security controls help you to prevent the majority of cyberattacks your organization will face each year. But along with putting controls in place, you must also continually look for gaps in security programs and controls—and take steps to remediate them.

This type of continuous controls monitoring involves three essential technologies:

1. Inventorying controls. Determine which controls are currently in place as part of your security performance management program.
2. Identifying your attack surface. Assemble a comprehensive view of the attack surface that your controls are meant to protect. This comprises your entire digital footprint including subsidiaries, geographies, assets, IPs, and domains.
3. Assessing effectiveness of controls. Continually assess how effective your controls are so you can identify gaps for remediation.

Improving security with CCM

No matter how strong your security programs are, you’re bound to have vulnerabilities in your security controls. Gaps like misconfigured software, unpatched systems, and open ports can all expose your organization to cyber risk. Even when you remediate these gaps, new issues will inevitably arise over time. Traditional security solutions help resolve these issues, but they’re merely addressing symptoms on a case-by-case basis rather than identifying root causes.

Constantly assessing the effectiveness of your security controls requires significant and costly manual effort, expertise, and analysis. That’s why Bitsight for Security Performance Management has introduced Control Insights, a continuous controls monitoring solution to help you move away from tactical methods of fixing vulnerabilities to a strategic focus on the true variables that impact cyber risk.

Bitsight Control Insights

Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) provides tools for tracking and improving security program performance over time. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight SPM facilitates cyber risk oversight and streamlines program management decisions.

Control Insights, a feature of Bitsight SPM, provides an automated approach to continuous controls monitoring. Control Insights uses a best practice framework to measure how effective your security controls are and to suggest the best ways to remediate any gaps. Leveraging over 540 billion externally observable events each day that are gathered from more than 120 different sources, Control Insights offers an objective, evidence-based, continuous controls monitoring capability to measure the effectiveness of your controls consistently and reliably.

Unlike point solutions that only measure the effectiveness of a single control, Control Insights assesses effectiveness across your extended organization without requiring any initial configuration. Control Insights measures security program progress over the past six months to streamline efforts to develop performant security controls. Insights available through this Bitsight technology include:

• A prescriptive analysis of each control’s effectiveness.
• An explanation as to why a Control Insight was triggered.
• Details about the evidence surrounding each security control.

Continuous controls monitoring with Bitsight

When relying on Bitsight Control Insights, your security teams count on several essential benefits.

Root cause analysis of security vulnerabilities

Rather than simply resolving issues, Bitsight Control Insights identifies the true variables that impact cyber risk, providing your team with a more meaningful way to improve overall security performance.

No more “whack-a-mole” with security findings

By addressing the root causes of security gaps, you can avoid the “whack-a-mole” syndrome where a gap is fixed one week only to see a similar issue pop up the next. For example, rather than simply identifying and removing expired certificates from digital assets Control Insights empowers security teams to implement a control to prevent expired certificates in the first place.

A proactive approach to addressing gaps

Control Insights continuously assesses the effectiveness of security controls across your extended organization, without requiring any initial configuration. It enables the kind of continuous controls monitoring that enables you to proactively secure your organization against an evolving threat landscape.

Why choose Bitsight?

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains.

Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.