Digital risk protection (DRP) solutions can be powerful operational tools for security analysts and threat researchers looking to identify and address existing cyber risk exposures quickly. While these solutions can provide valuable assessments, they focus on short-term outcomes rather than long-term ones. DRP tools are more tactical than strategic in nature — and often do not provide the necessary context to make informed business decisions.
That’s where Bitsight for Security Performance Management (SPM) can come in to offer additional insights and visibility into your security posture, and an industry-adopted way of sharing and communicating security performance.
Read on to learn more about the ways in which SPM can complement a DRP offering, and how to determine what type of solution is right for your business.
Digital risk protection explained
Let’s start by going over the basics. DRP tools leverage cyber threat intelligence to identify vulnerabilities, open ports, stolen credentials, and more. From coverage of potential social media threats to extensive Deep and Dark Web capabilities, digital risk protection solutions have a variety of strengths.
Overall, DRP tools empower security analysts and threat researchers to do the following:
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- Cyber exposure mitigation: Use actionable data, alerting, and remediation workflows to quickly mitigate threats.
- Digital footprinting: Understand which assets belong to their organization or might be impersonating their organization.
- Threat landscape and hunting: Identify active campaigns against their organization or industry sector.
- Company and brand protection: Discover malicious actors impersonating their brand or targeting their executives.
Gain additional context and visibility
While DRP vendors provide operational tools for reducing exposure and driving cyber risk remediation activities, these solutions don’t focus on the strategic end of the security spectrum. Essentially, these tools offer short-term exposure mitigation insights rather than more proactive, long-term performance management context.
That’s where Bitsight for Security Performance Management can come in to serve as a complementary — or in some cases, alternative — solution.
Overall, the Bitsight SPM suite helps security leaders understand their performance over time, determine how to allocate their limited resources effectively, and make risk-based program decisions based on security ratings — an objective, verifiable measure of security performance. Here are a few specific ways that SPM provides the additional context and visibility you need to make more informed, strategic security decisions:
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- Go beyond point-in-time assessments: Continuously monitor for and identify gaps in cybersecurity controls across 23 risk vectors — and see how your security posture is changing over time.
- Forecast future performance: Model scenarios, create action plans, and track progress to identify paths to reduce cyber risk and better allocate resources.
- Benchmark your program against industry peers: Gain unprecedented visibility into the relative performance of your security program so you can make informed, comparative decisions about where to focus your efforts to achieve continuous improvement — and how to meet or surpass industry benchmarks and standards of care.
- Facilitate data-driven security conversations with stakeholders: Use a standardized cybersecurity KPI — based on independent, objective, and broadly accepted data — to report on program effectiveness in a clear, easily understandable way to customers, regulators, cyber insurers, and board members.
Find the right digital risk protection solution for your business
When evaluating different offerings, security leaders must ensure that they make the right choice based on the size, scale, and needs of their businesses. From a DRP perspective, an enterprise with thousands of sensitive digital assets scattered across the globe may benefit from a complete DRP solution that offers extensive Digital Asset Management capabilities. These organizations can then use SPM to give context and visibility into the performance of that tool.
However, for other enterprises, DRP may be overkill. Depending on the size of your organization, a more cost-effective solution, such as SPM, might be the better option. With SPM, you can still get visibility and context into critical vulnerabilities and infections impacting your organization — including those that are not being detected by other types of tools — while also gaining the insights you need to improve performance and tackle key business challenges.
Interested in learning more about how Bitsight for Security Performance Management empowers you to reduce the risk in your expanding digital ecosystem quickly and efficiently? Download our white paper.