How Your Enterprise Can Achieve a State of Cyber Resilience

Today’s threat landscape presents a unique challenge for security and vendor risk managers. Bad actors are finding new, sneakier ways to access sensitive data, and ransomware demands are higher than ever. Consider the statistics. Ransomware attacks nearly doubled in 2021 and will remain a dominant threat in 2022.

What can you do to prevent cyber attacks and ensure a state of cyber resilience?  Let's examine four best practices your organization can use.

1. Gain Visibility Into Your Expanding Digital Footprint

First, discover and validate your digital footprint. Without this step it’s challenging to prioritize cyber risk remediation. 

Typically, this involves recording all digital assets in a worksheet. But that’s a time-consuming process and fails to account for the dynamic nature of today’s digital environment where new assets are continually being deployed and others retired. Additionally, shadow IT, such as SaaS applications acquired outside the ownership and control of IT operations, can go undetected.

A better way to obtain the big picture of your enterprise’s complete digital assets is to use attack surface scanning technology like Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. With Bitsight, you can automatically and continuously take inventory of your digital assets—on-premises, in the cloud, and across business units, geographies, and shadow IT. You can also quickly and easily identify areas of concentrated risk. For example, if a Microsoft Azure cloud instance in Frankfurt exhibits several vulnerabilities, you can move quickly to address these cybersecurity gaps.
 

2. Achieve a Continuous View Into Network Risk

Take steps to continuously monitor and measure security performance across your digital footprint to mitigate emerging vulnerabilities and threats. This will allow you to better identify the standards of care your organization must attain to achieve cyber resilience.

An effective way to assess cyber risk is to use Bitsight Security Ratings. Security ratings are a data-driven measurement of your enterprise-wide security performance. Findings are presented as a numerical score (like a credit score) ranging from 250 to 900, with a higher rating equaling better cybersecurity performance. If a vulnerability is detected, Bitsight will notify you so you can get ahead of potential risks.

But don’t just learn about security gaps; understand and remediate them. With Control Insights, part of Bitsight for Security Performance Management, you can automatically drill down into the root cause of vulnerabilities, get specifics on “the why” of a control’s state, and receive a recommended course of action based on the appropriate CIS controls and/or safeguards.

3. Understand Which Remediation Actions Drive Cyber Resilience

Keep an eye on your security rating over time to measure and quantify cyber risk and communicate your organization’s cyber resilience in terms that all stakeholders, including senior leaders and board members, can understand. This can help business leaders decide where to focus investment to ensure the fastest and most significant results. 

Bitsight Forecasting can help. Using security performance data from hundreds of thousands of global organizations, Bitsight Forecasting can predict the security performance of any enterprise. You can model scenarios and see how a change in resource allocation or technology implementation may influence your security posture. 

With this visibility, you can give confident advice about which actions will reduce risk quickly. Then, once you identify the path you want to pursue, you can use Bitsight to track your progress so you can determine the impact of program changes, update executives and the board, and ensure your organization hits its goals.
 

4. Monitor Third-Party Cyber Hygiene

With the growth of digital supply chains, cyber-attacks targeting third parties are becoming a big issue. Minimize this risk by understanding your vendors’ security postures, but not through security questionnaires or assessments. Those happen too infrequently, are manually intensive, and only capture a point-in-time view of risk.

Fortunately, Bitsight data also exposes risk in your digital supply chain. Using Bitsight for Third-Party Management, you can automatically and continuously monitor your third parties for vulnerabilities, indications of a lack of security controls, and performance issues (historical and current). Bitsight can be used to provide a reliable cyber risk picture during the onboarding process and includes seamless integrations with ServiceNow, ProcessUnity, ThirdPartyTrust, and Venminder. Once the contract is signed, you can monitor your vendors’ security throughout the life of the relationship. You can also share Bitsight’s findings with vendors—making cyber resilience a more collaborative process.

Achieve a State of Cyber Resilience—Faster

With the comprehensive insights that Bitsight delivers, you can achieve the otherwise impossible feat of seeing your network the way a hacker does. With this outside-in view of your organization’s security posture and your third-party ecosystems, you can confidently approach cyber decision-making and achieve a state of cyber resilience, faster.