Forecasting and Advanced Analytics: Building a Solid Security Strategy For 2020

2020 is not only the beginning of a new year, but the start of a new decade, and with it comes the dawn of a new era for the digital world. We’re now in the midst of the once far-off, “futuristic” time periods old books and movies used to dream about. But does your security performance management strategy match the functionality of today’s technology?

Security ratings provide the most objective, quantitative measurement for CISOs, executives, and boards to properly gauge their performance and breach susceptibility. But as companies invite more tech into their ecosystems, hire more people, and partner with more vendors, the complexity of their security strategy becomes more tangled than ever. Going forward, having an ironclad security program will require an even more holistic picture of the company’s posture, both currently and historically. Bitsight Forecasting and Advanced Analytics provide a complete picture of your security posture for the most objective, data-based decision making.

Bitsight Forecasting: Looking Back, Looking Forward, and Beyond

CISOs and other decision makers are often at a loss for where to allocate security budgets, what technology and processes to implement, and which activities will help reduce risk — especially without objective data to back it up. Bitsight Forecasting helps security leaders chart their progress and project their organization’s future security performance. Forecasting answers these difficult, yet critical questions with two years’ worth of data, including:

• One year of historical data
• One year of projection data for the coming year’s security performance

With the ability to model different scenarios and paths of remediation, users can better predict where vulnerabilities will appear, how their performance will change over time with proper mitigation, and where to invest security budgets going forward.

Just as people reassess their personal performance and goals at the start of each new year, Bitsight Forecasting provides the assessment and analytics tools you need to keep track of your company’s security performance over time. With security forecasting, you can objectively analyze what areas the business has improved or declined in, providing benchmarks and supportive data for future goal-setting.

Advanced Analytics: Know Where to Aim

When security standards aren’t being met, it’s a given that you should work to improve the company’s performance. But at what security rating should you be performing?

Bitsight Peer Analytics helps put security ratings in context by comparing them against organizations of similar size, industry, employee count, and resources to provide a more realistic security standard to aim for. These results can even be customized to uncover:

• Competitive analysis — how their security performance ranks against the competition
• Ratings targets — what ratings they should be achieving
• Quick gap analysis — a quick analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in resource allocation and prioritization
• Root cause risk vector analysis — why the business unit is performing worse than their peers

The biggest differentiator Bitsight provides? Data that goes beyond a single entity to examine the security performance of hundreds of thousands of anonymized companies. This way, you’re armed, not only with data about your own company, but with the posture of peer companies (and even competitors) for more robust, comprehensive, and realistic projections.

Finally — you can go beyond just knowing “we need to do better” with a tangible report of to-dos that dictates which improvements will have the most positive impact on your security rating (and the greatest return for your efforts). Plus, there’s no shortage of use cases for Advanced Analytics. Security executives and risk leaders traditionally use Advanced Analytics for a number of reasons, including board reporting; evidence of security team efforts and measurable impact of work, justification of security/business spend and performance; prioritization of resource allocation and security efforts; tracking of progress toward goals over time; and support for security intervention conversations with underperforming business units.

Uncover the Full Picture

Now is the perfect time to be thinking about what changes and improvements you need to make to your security program in 2020. Bitsight’s Forecasting and Advanced Analytics capabilities can not only give you the cold, hard data you need to confirm your security posture, but arm you with the historical insights, specific tasks, and projections you need to properly allocate resources and build a more robust and comprehensive security strategy going forward.

Read the Brief to Learn What Bitsight Advanced Analytics Can Do For Your 2020 Planning