How to Highlight Your Security Performance With Primary Ratings

What’s the best way to represent your security posture?

A security rating is a great way to see your overall cybersecurity performance, but what if you have certain areas where the rating doesn’t tell the full story of your cybersecurity posture? Accurately representing your company not only helps you build trust and confidence with your vendors and customers, but it helps you manage your program overall. That’s why Bitsight enables companies to create a rating based on the infrastructure that best represents their company, called a Self-Published rating, and then share it publicly as a Primary Rating. This helps security leaders govern and manage programs, while maintaining transparency with stakeholders.

Manage, Govern, and Assure with Self-Published Ratings

Best viewed with the Ratings Tree, Self-Published entities enable you to draw lines around the infrastructure that you believe most accurately represents a subset of your organization, or the organization itself. Once you’ve outlined the pieces that you feel truly represents your company or entity, Bitsight will calculate a new rating for them. You can use that rating internally as a governance tool or externally to provide a highly contextual view of your cybersecurity posture to a wide range of stakeholders. 

For example, many companies don’t want to include a guest wifi network or similar infrastructure in their overall security rating. Maybe your security team is split up between multiple business units or geographies that you want to measure separately from a strategic perspective. Or, perhaps your enterprise has a malware research lab that would make your overall performance look lower than it really is. Whatever your reasoning is, creating self-published ratings gives you and your stakeholders highly contextual insight into the security performance across your organization.

Self-Published Ratings help you manage different aspects of your security program. Enhance your management capabilities by making it easier for your teams to focus on the part of the overall digital footprint that is their area of responsibility. This enables you to direct prioritized work and investment towards areas of concern.

A Self-Published entity serves as a catalyst to communicate information about your cybersecurity program. Whether you’re looking to have different representations across key regions or IP addresses, or simply cut out areas that don’t make sense for your company, self-publishing lets you more easily communicate program performance to executives or key stakeholders.

Put Your Best Foot Forward with a Primary Rating

Once you have Self-Published entities in place, you can choose to then designate one (or a few) of them as a Primary Rating. A Primary Rating publicly communicates what you believe to most accurately represent your security performance to third parties like customers or investors. You can include a description for your Primary Rating to indicate that you’re excluding things like guest networks or malware research lab networks. For each curated entity in your tree you can set one Primary Rating, meaning you can have a designated public rating for areas like business units, geographic regions, or market spaces.

Primary Ratings assure customers, stakeholders, and investors of the best representation of your cybersecurity posture. Primary Ratings show that you’re putting in the effort to strategize about your security footprint, attack surface, and other security implications. Putting in the effort to publish a Primary Rating enables you to create transparency with stakeholders, while also proving your reputation as being a trusted company to work with. And, third parties who monitor you will have the Primary Rating (if there is one) recommended to them by the product.

Create the Best Representation of Your Cybersecurity Posture

Bitsight’s self-publishing empowers you to create the best view representing your security performance and share the most relevant and impactful insights with leadership so you can more easily govern and manage your program. And by making a self-published entity a Primary Rating, you can assure vendors of your strong performance and reputation.

For more information about how you can create Self-Published entities, watch our in-depth video on the Ratings Tree.