Driving Operational Efficiency in Your Cybersecurity Remediation Process

Let’s face it: In order to get the most out of your limited time and resources, you need to rethink the traditional processes you have in place throughout your risk management program — from the initial discovery and assessment phases to ongoing performance monitoring. By finding new operational efficiencies in each stage, you can maximize your cybersecurity ROI and ultimately do more with less.

Gone are the days when you can (or should!) respond to every security alert in the same manner. As your team continues to adjust to the “new normal” operating environment, it’s more important than ever that you have the necessary context and visibility to be more strategic in where you focus your mitigation efforts.

Are you ready to optimize your resources and move toward a risk-based, outcome-driven approach to security performance management? Read on learn how to make your cyber risk remediation process more efficient and effective.

Prioritize efforts based on areas of disproportionate risk

In many ways, prioritization is the key to optimizing your remediation process. After all, your team may be inundated with alerts — some of which may prove to be false positives — and you don’t have the bandwidth or resources to tackle every potential issue that comes your way. In order to prioritize effectively, you need to have a system in place that empowers you to gain visibility into your expanding attack surface and regularly assess all of your critical assets for disproportionate risk.

That’s where Bitsight Security Ratings come in. Derived from objective, verifiable data, security ratings provide a dynamic measurement of your organization’s cybersecurity posture — making it easier than ever for you to rate your performance and identify vulnerabilities across your digital ecosystem. Bitsight Security Ratings are calculated using externally observable data on compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and public disclosures. And these four data categories are comprised of various risk vectors, including everything from botnet infections and exposed credentials to open ports and patching cadence.

By looking at your ratings for different risk vectors, you can identify areas of disproportionate risk and prioritize your efforts accordingly. For instance, the Bitsight platform assesses open ports to evaluate whether any unnecessary access points exist. And recent research by Bitsight found that organizations with an F as their Bitsight Open Port grade are more than twice as likely to experience a breach than companies with an A. This is the type of finding that you would want your team to address immediately so that you could prevent a potentially damaging security incident.

By having these data-driven insights at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions on how to prioritize limited resources and focus remediation efforts on the areas that can have the biggest impact on your cybersecurity posture.

Streamline the process of collecting and using data for remediation

It’s clear that data plays a major role in your ability to make strategic cybersecurity decisions. But in order for you to be able to use your data effectively, it needs to be easy to access. After all, you don’t have the time to reference multiple different dashboards or go through a slow, manual process of compiling insights from various tools.

Through Bitsight’s integrations with SIEM tools like Splunk, it’s easier than ever to pull your Bitsight findings into existing security workflows and dashboards — so you can refer to all of your threat intelligence insights in one place.

By combining your Bitsight observations with other security findings you may already be collecting, you can extract more value from this data than ever before — and streamline the process of compiling and using cybersecurity insights to make more informed, comparative remediation decisions.

Report on improvement using a common language

Another huge factor in your ability to make your remediation process as efficient as possible is whether you have a means through which to clearly track and communicate your team’s progress on addressing the cybersecurity gaps that you discover.

With Bitsight Security Ratings — which are based on independent, objective, and broadly accepted data — you can unite your entire organization around a standardized KPI and common language for quantifying security performance. And as these ratings are updated on a daily basis, you can always have real-time insight into your program effectiveness, and how your investments in remediation resources are impacting your cybersecurity posture over time.

And now, with our recently released Issue Tracking for Remediation feature, it’s easier than ever to monitor your progress on remediation activities. With this exciting new capability, you can set the status of specific Bitsight findings and assign ownership for remediation activities directly from your MyCompany or MySubsidiary Findings Table in the portal. Now, you can ditch your manual remediation status tracking sheets and monitor your progress directly in the Bitsight platform.

Get the most out of your limited time and resources

In today’s ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, it’s more important than ever to be able to quickly identify which potential threats and existing risks you need to mitigate first for the greatest performance impact. With Bitsight Security Ratings, you can ensure you always have the necessary context and visibility to optimize your cyber risk remediation plan.

Interested in learning more about how to do more with less? Check out our new ebook, 3 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Security Investments.