Strengthen Security Performance through Accurate Data and Advanced Analytics

It’s no surprise to anyone that the cybersecurity landscape continues to be rocky. The average cost of a data breach worldwide is $4.35 million, and the EU Agency for Cybersecurity says that more than 10 terabytes of data are stolen every month. In fact, ransomware-as-a-service has grown into a full-fledged industry. Every stakeholder from Boards to finance teams are asking cybersecurity leaders, “How strong is our cybersecurity program?” 

It’s an important question, with a very layered response. To answer that question, cybersecurity leaders need to:
Establish metric-driven standards 

• Drive accountability across the extended organization 
• Understand priorities for investment
• Remediate gaps and achieve the standards your company set
• Confidently communicate cybersecurity performance to key stakeholders 

If all that feels overwhelming, you aren’t alone. But, there are strategies and methods you can implement to make the best cybersecurity decisions quickly and confidently. It starts with understanding the data and risk factors that are most important to you and how to gain insights from that data. 

Build Your Cybersecurity Strategy on a Foundation of Data

With all that’s at stake for an organization in today’s cybersecurity environment, security leaders need to make the right decisions about investments, remediation, and strategy. Not only that, but they need to stay a step ahead of attackers. But if you’re relying on disjointed processes that don’t take into account all the data across your digital footprint (or untrustworthy data in general), you aren’t getting the meaningful insights you need to make decisions. You’re too busy responding to what attackers are doing instead of building resiliency into your programs. 

It all starts with having the right data. From high-quality datasets, you can glean mission-critical insights you can take action on, including addressing current risk problems and planning for the future. With the right data, security leaders become better defenders, move their strategy from good to great, and get automated and continuous visibility into where cybersecurity falls short. 

In short: the right cybersecurity strategy needs the right data to be successful. By running all your risk processes in one trusted place that incorporates data across your enterprise (and taking into account the data from meaningful peers), you ensure continuity, collaboration, and communication. In this way, you more easily and rapidly build strong security performance. 

7 Advanced Analytics to Track Security Performance

Once you have a trusted foundation of good data in place, it then informs analytics that you can use to get the right insights. Data on its own isn’t useful unless you have the right context or insights around it to quickly and reliably make decisions. The right suite of advanced analytics lets you govern, manage, and assure stakeholders about your cybersecurity performance. Many security leaders find actionable insights with these seven insights:

1. How you compare against a meaningful set of peers 
2. An understanding of your company’s digital assets
3. Your financial exposure to cyber risk
4. The effectiveness of a security control’s performance over time
5. Where to focus daily, continuous remediation efforts
6. Risk distribution across your enterprise
7. Simulating how decisions will impact your program performance 

Analytics like these take the guesswork out of understanding and strengthening your security performance. And these analytics and insights don’t have to be siloed across different processes or platforms. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Bitsight for Security Performance Management (SPM) enables all these insights in one trusted platform so you can stop reacting and start protecting against security threats.

Bitsight for SPM to Strengthen Security Performance

Bitsight’s quality of data is unrivaled, providing breadth and depth of accurate analytics for actionable insights and strategic decisions. Our holistic set of capabilities empower you with key insights by providing detailed reports, metrics, and projections from hundreds of thousands of anonymized companies across industries and sizes. Built on a foundation of extensive data sets, SPM provides a suite of advanced analytics for leaders to build cyber resilience over time.

To learn more about how Bitsight’s accurate data and advanced cybersecurity analytics give you the insights needed to make the right decisions, download our ebook “Build Cyber Resilience with Bitsight’s Advanced Analytics.”