Cloud Security Audit

Mitigate risk with a cloud security audit

As organizations increasingly turn to cloud services, the number of annual cloud security breaches have outpaced attacks towards on-premises infrastructure. To combat these threats, security teams must perform regular cloud security audits to better understand the attack surface, identify controls to protect it, and monitor security performance. Visibility is key – risk teams need timely, objective cyber security information that can reveal the cloud security posture of their organization and of the many third-party and forth-party vendors in their supply chain.

Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight offers solutions for monitoring the attack surface, identifying gaps in security controls, and preparing cyber security presentations for leadership that can deliver a more aligned approach to cloud security across the organization.

Elements of a cloud security audit

While audits should be customized to the size of the organization and the challenges of specific industries, there are certain best practices that tend to be common to all cloud security audits.

Evaluating security posture of providers

Just as organizations monitor the security posture of vendors before onboarding, a cloud security audit should independently evaluate and summarize risk based on data-driven insights into the security posture of cloud service providers. Automated tools can help to streamline this process and minimize the burden on risk management teams who traditionally perform assessments manually.

Visualizing the attack surface

A cloud security audit should spotlight vulnerabilities and risk across the attack surface, including cloud services and infrastructure. By continuously monitoring and analyzing a cloud environment, security teams can identify gaps in security controls and pinpoint specific and actionable risk points across cloud assets. This information can help to focus efforts on remediating areas of concentrated risk, and helps prioritize risk reduction towards the most pressing vulnerability instead of treating every risk the same. Cloud security monitoring can also resolve the challenge of the shared responsibility model of cloud services, delivering visibility into the risk profile of the cloud assets.

Establishing controls

Violations of access management are some of the most common cloud security risks. A cloud security audit can reveal issues with password policies, permissions, multi-vector authentication, and user interaction with cloud assets.

Setting sharing standards

Unauthorized use of file sharing services represents a significant risk to security. A cloud security audit should highlight potential threats in filesharing activities and review data loss prevention policies.

Monitor patching cadence

Sticking to a regular patching cadence is essential for cloud security. A cloud security audit can help to quickly identify unpatched systems and prioritize efforts and resources to ensure that the most critical systems are prioritized for patching.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform 

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the visibility and metrics security teams need to perform an efficient and effective cloud security audits.

Founded in 2011, Bitsight is dedicated to transforming how organizations evaluate risk and security performance. Bitsight pioneered the outside-in approach to security ratings, the same approach used by credit rating agencies. Today, Bitsight is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to deliver a clear picture of their security posture and to spotlight risk in their supply chain.

The Bitsight platform offers a suite of solutions for measuring the security performance of organizations and their vendors. Each of these solutions is built on Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings, which offer a comprehensive picture of a company’s overall cybersecurity posture. Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with higher ratings indicating better overall security performance.

Bitsight’s Security Ratings don’t rely on traditional techniques like questionnaires, on-site visits, and penetration testing. Rather, ratings are based on objective and externally verifiable data drawn from 120+ sources. Ratings are based on metrics in four areas of cybersecurity: evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Ratings are calculated using a proprietary algorithm that prioritizes higher-value risk vectors for the most accurate measurement of security performance.

Benefits for cloud security posture

With the Bitsight Security Ratings platform, security teams can take advantage of several solutions when performing a cloud security audit.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight provides a centralized dashboard that inventories all digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, third party, and business unit. Bitsight also lists the corresponding cyber risk associated with each asset. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics helps to discover hidden assets and cloud instances, assessing them for risk and helping to bring them in line with corporate security policies and industry regulations or standards.

Bitsight For Security Performance Management

Bitsight delivers an unbiased, objective view of the security posture of your cloud infrastructure and systems as well as those of your cloud service providers. This external view on your attack surface can validate or inform the analysis your teams have developed internally.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

In addition to measuring an organization’s security performance, Bitsight provides immediate insight into cyber risk within the supply chain, including cloud service providers.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight’s security benchmarking capabilities help security teams to measure cloud security performance against industry peers. With proper benchmarking data, security managers can provide context around what their cybersecurity data really mean, and facilitate communication with company decision makers.

Bitsight Executive Reports

Bitsight’s reporting capabilities facilitate data-driven conversations that help security and risk leaders communicate effectively with company leadership. Tools for centralized reporting enable teams to quickly prepare information security presentations and easily update cybersecurity KPI dashboards. Security teams can leverage cybersecurity executive summary examples and templates or create custom reports on the fly.

Why choose Bitsight?

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains. Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.