Cloud Security Metrics

Mitigating Risk With Cloud Security Metrics

As the volume of attacks on cloud services continues to rise, CISOs and their teams need clear metrics for monitoring, assessing, and mitigating risk. However, a lack of visibility makes it challenging to track cybersecurity and cloud security metrics effectively. As your organization relies more heavily on cloud services and your workforce becomes increasingly remote, getting a clear view of your attack surface is more complex than ever. Without continuous visibility into all your assets in the cloud, it’s difficult to establish meaningful cloud security metrics and achieve superior cybersecurity protection.

BitSight can help. BitSight Attack Surface Analytics lets you shine a light on your attack surface as it expands to the cloud and remote environments. BitSight gives your security team continuous, broad visibility and context into your attack surface in the cloud and across hosting providers, so you can better monitor the most effective cloud security metrics and understand the risk profile of all your cloud-hosted assets.

Nine Security Metrics To Watch

Monitoring risk and improving security performance in the cloud and throughout your digital ecosystem begins with monitoring the right cloud and cyber risk metrics. Specific, quantifiable metrics can help you build a security program that thoroughly addresses the external, internal, and supply chain threats.

To monitor external threats, you’ll want to watch metrics like:

• The number of botnet infections per device over a period of time. This metric forces you to examine how many and what kind of botnets have infiltrated your network, and whether botnets are installing malware or performing data exfiltration.
• The number of unpatched known vulnerabilities. This metric can help to ensure that you’re adequately patching your own network, or if risks are left unpatched for dangerous amounts of time.
• The number of properly configured SSL certificates. Monitoring this metric can help you determine whether your SSL certificates meet the accepted level of security and whether servers are properly configured.

To monitor for internal threats, it’s helpful to track metrics like:

• The frequency with which employee access is reassessed. Waiting to reassess employees for prolonged periods of time could be a cause for concern and cause phishing attempts and improper access to go undetected.
• The amount of peer-to-peer filesharing activity. The number of files that have been shared or downloaded through unauthorized technologies is typically a good measure of security posture.
• The percentage of “super users.” Higher numbers of super users – employees that have broad access to data within the organization – may increase your chances of an insider-based attack.

To track threats within your supply chain, you can monitor metrics such as:

• The number of open ports. Monitoring open ports over a period of time can help you understand whether third-party vendors are leaving channels exposed to bad actors using unencrypted channels.
• The percentage of third-party software that is scanned for vulnerabilities before deployment. If this metric is less than 100%, your corporate network could be at risk.
• The percentage of vendors whose cybersecurity effectiveness is continuously monitored. Continuous monitoring solutions help you keep an eye on third-party risk in the weeks and months between questionnaires, audits, and penetration tests, and sometimes take the place of these manual assessments altogether.

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics allows you to overcome visibility challenges and to get a handle on the risk hidden in your digital assets in the cloud as well as other geographies, subsidiaries, and remote IT environments. As part of BitSight for Security Performance Management, this BitSight solution lets you continuously discover, segment, and assess risk for all your cloud-hosted assets.

In addition to cloud security metrics, BitSight Attack Surface Analytics provides visibility into your entire digital ecosystem. With BitSight, you can:

• Enjoy unprecedented visibility into all digital endpoints. Rather than manually tracking asset inventory via spreadsheets, your teams can automatically discover vulnerabilities throughout your ecosystem and identify their location for faster remediation.
• Discover shadow IT instances. Superior security requires a strategy to deal with shadow IT – those technologies that are spun up by teams or individuals without the knowledge or approval of your IT staff. BitSight lets you easily discover shadow IT and the associated risks and threats, including cloud providers or cloud-based applications that are not a part of your inventory of contracted vendors.
• Identify areas of disproportionate risk. With a view of your digital assets that spans your entire ecosystem, you can easily search for areas of critical or excessive risk and prioritize them for remediation.
• Measure risk on remote networks. BitSight simplifies the task of gaining visibility into risk associated with unmonitored and insecure home and remote offices. Your security teams can discover new business risk associated with remote environments and determine appropriate risk mitigation measures.

How BitSight Monitors Cloud Security Metrics

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics provides a centralized dashboard that shows the location of your digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit. It also reveals the risk associated with each endpoint so you can quickly prioritize efforts for remediation.

For example, with clear visibility into your cloud footprint, you can view the security of cloud-hosted assets based on the number of material and severe findings. These may reveal unknown vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and infections that could expose your organization to the risk of a breach.

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics also offers additional context, including geographic location. A map-based view on the dashboard puts an end to guessing about security risk locations. Your teams can determine the precise location of a vulnerable endpoints in the cloud and prioritize remediation efforts by ranking asset importance by cloud provider.

If you’re using multi-cloud environments, you can compare the security posture of multiple instances within one provider or the security of instances across providers Your teams can identify cloud instances that fail to adhere to corporate security policies, allowing them to quickly and easily bring these instances into alignment by identifying the exact risk-points that aren’t up to par.

Why Choose BitSight For Cloud Security Metrics?

As the world’s leading Security Rating Service, BitSight delivers actionable security ratings, cloud security metrics, and security benchmarks. Through continuous monitoring of large sets of objective and independently verified cybersecurity data, BitSight generates Security Ratings that are a proven tool for measuring the security performance of organizations and the effectiveness of their cybersecurity models. For many of the world’s leading organizations, BitSight Security Ratings are an essential tool for superior cybersecurity governance.

BitSight’s Security Ratings platform is home to the most robust community of cyber risk professionals across all industries. More than 20% of the world’s countries trust BitSight to protect national security, and 25% of Fortune 500 companies use BitSight to enhance security performance. BitSight is also the choice of 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all of the Big 4 accounting firms.

FAQs: What Are Cloud Security Metrics?