How to Make More Informed, Data-Driven Security Decisions

Data can be the key to making more informed, strategic cybersecurity decisions — and ensuring you’re spending your security dollars effectively. In order to get the most out of your increasingly limited security resources and meet or surpass industry benchmarks, you need visibility into the relative performance of your security program — and insight into the cyber risk present across your ecosystem.

Understand and meet rapidly changing standards of care

In today’s competitive marketplace, it’s never been more important to meet customer requirements and industry-wide standards of care in cybersecurity. A failure to do so could result in damaging legal, financial, and reputational repercussions. In fact, as stated in a recent Forrester study commissioned by Bitsight, Better Security and Business Outcomes With Security Performance Management, “companies win and lose business based on both real and perceived security performance challenges.”

Of course, staying on top of the latest regulations and industry benchmarks can sometimes be a difficult feat. Expectations and standards of care are constantly in flux — now, more than ever, as the world continues to adjust to our “new normal” operating environment. In order to perform comprehensive, real-time evaluations, today’s security leaders need to move beyond point-in-time security assessments and gain insight into industry-wide standards of care.

With Bitsight Peer Analytics, you can gain unprecedented visibility into the security benchmarks that exist in your industry, sector, and peer group — based on the cybersecurity data of hundreds of thousands of global organizations. Armed with these insights, you can:

• Identify gaps in security performance: Uncover gaps in your cybersecurity program based on a comparison of risk vectors within your peer group.
• Create informed improvement plans: Understand where you fall short of the industry standard and develop a data-driven cybersecurity risk remediation plan.
• Report confidently: Share critical security performance metrics with executives, the board, customers, and regulators — and report on how your program aligns to or exceeds industry security benchmarks.

Gain visibility into security performance across business units and subsidiaries

Over recent months, as the workforce has gone increasingly remote, digital ecosystems have been expanding and cyber threats have been evolving at faster rates than ever before. There’s no question about it: Your attack surface is growing and it’s more important than ever to have a means through which you can gain visibility into all of your digital assets and prioritize remediation efforts based on areas of highest exposure.

This is an increasingly complex undertaking for large enterprises, which typically consist of multiple distinct organizational groups that each have a unique structure, function, and ecosystem of digital touchpoints. In order to take a strategic, outcome-driven approach to cybersecurity, you need insights into where the greatest cyber risk exists throughout your distributed organization.

That’s where Bitsight Enterprise Analytics comes in — providing you with visibility into your security performance across business units, subsidiaries, and other organizational groups. With these data-driven insights, you can:

• Discover group-based performance deficiencies: Use real-time, meaningful, and objective data and metrics to uncover the factors within each enterprise group that most significantly impact overall security performance, such as unpatched systems, insecure access points, and existing malware infections.
• Create informed improvement plans: Set performance targets and create improvement plans by enterprise group.
• Report more impactfully to the board: Measure and manage the security performance of different units within your corporate structure and confidently report outcomes to senior executives and the board.

Identify paths to reduce cyber risk and better allocate resources

As stated in the Forrester study, “cybersecurity is now a board-level topic and one that senior business stakeholders believe contributes to the financial performance of their firm.” Your board and senior leadership team want to ensure you have a strong security program in place — now, more than ever, as the widespread shift to Work From Home-Remote Office networks has introduced corporate devices to a variety of new and unique cyber risks.

Of course, it can be challenging to determine which adjustments to your security program will deliver the fastest and most significant results. In order to make strategic decisions, you need to be able to take a forward-looking view into your security performance.

Leveraging unique risk and cybersecurity analytics only available through the Bitsight ecosystem, Bitsight Forecasting allows you to identify the optimal course of action to improve your cybersecurity risk posture. This offering empowers you to:

• Model different scenarios: Explore a variety of security scenarios to identify immediate opportunities for security performance improvement and project how changes to processes, technologies, and culture will impact your environment over time.
• Create strategic action plans: Generate logical, data-informed plans of action that guide your organization down the road to continuous process improvement.
• Track progress: When you identify a path you want to pursue, track progress to determine the impact of program changes, update executives and the board, and ensure the organization hits its goals.

By building data-driven action plans, you can make more informed, strategic cybersecurity decisions when it comes to resource allocation and investment prioritization — empowering you to maximize your cybersecurity ROI and guide your organization down the road to continuous process improvement.

Interested in learning more about how to take an outcome-driven, strategic approach to cybersecurity? Download our new ebook, 3 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Security Investments.