Minimize third-party risk through continuous monitoring
Third-party risk management is a critical concern for every organization outsourcing work, or partnering with vendors for increased business efficiency. With third-party data breaches at an all-time high, your CIO must know how to mitigate third-party risk effectively to protect your organization from the devastating impact of cyberattacks.
Yearly, manual assessments – the traditional methods of third-party cyber risk management – aren’t sufficient to protect from cybersecurity threats. Not only are they slow and costly to implement for the large amount of vendors organizations rely on, they are completely up to the vendor to be accurate, and don’t include objective evaluation. Most important, annual assessments only provide a view of security at a single point in time. They simply can't deliver the timely, objective information you need to protect the organization.
Bitsight, the world's leading Security Rating Service, includes continuous monitoring technology that can help manage third-party risk more effectively by providing greater visibility into your organization’s threat landscape. Continuous monitoring also helps your cybersecurity program run more efficiently, accelerating the number of vendors you can onboard without exceeding a manageable risk threshold.
How continuous monitoring enhances security posture
Continuously monitoring your vendors offers several critical advantages compared to the point-in-time nature of annual assessments.
- Faster identification of threats. By continuously monitoring the risk posed by third-party vendors, CIOs can immediately take action when a vendor vulnerability is detected. Continuous monitoring enables a proactive approach, triggering action based on changes in a vendor's security rating.
- Customized assessments. While annual assessments treat all vendors as the same, continuous monitoring lets CIOs tailor the cadence of reviews to the risk posed by each vendor. This saves significant time and resources for the vendors you do want to assess, instead of spreading resources to evaluate all vendors.
- An objective lens. Continuous monitoring using objective data provides context for the self-assessments that vendors complete, allowing CIOs to verify the accuracy of vendors' assessments.
- Faster onboarding. Continuous monitoring reduces the time and cost required to onboard vendors, allowing organizations to see value from vendors sooner.
Continuous monitoring with Bitsight
Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides continuous monitoring solutions to efficiently expose risk in your supply chain, help you better allocate resources, and facilitate working with vendors to measurably reduce third-party risk in cyber security.
Bitsight's continuous monitoring technology uses Security Ratings to measure a vendor's cybersecurity performance based on objective and verifiable information. Security Ratings are derived from externally observable data about compromised systems, diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. By gathering information about everything from botnet infections and spam propagation to patching cadence and open ports, Bitsight can issue a daily rating in an easy-to-understand format that continually provides security managers with the latest view of every vendor's security posture.
By adopting a continuous monitoring system with Bitsight, you can:
- Set risk thresholds that trigger when a vendor’s Security Rating drops below your comfort level.
- Get an immediate cybersecurity report when dangerous activity occurs, allowing you to act proactively before being contacted by the vendor.
- Establish a tiered methodology for monitoring certain critical vendors more closely.
Benefits of Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management
By providing insight into the risk surrounding your vendors, continuous monitoring with Bitsight offers distinct advantages for third-party risk management.
- Reduce risk with a clear picture of security performance across your entire portfolio. Bitsight Security Ratings enable data-driven decisions based on your tolerance for risk and the risk involved in working with individual vendors. A Portfolio Risk Matrix allows you to make confident, data-driven decisions that drive risk reduction across your portfolio of vendors.
- Onboard vendors faster by assessing risk quickly and confidently. Bitsight reduces the time and cost required to onboard vendors and provides smart tiering recommendations that make onboarding programs more scalable.
- Monitor vendor security through the entire lifecycle. With Bitsight's third-party cyber risk management assessment, you can use continuous monitoring to track vendors throughout their lifecycle, starting even before the contract is signed.
- Get real-time updates on changes to vendor ratings. Reduce the time required to manage risk in the face of major vulnerabilities and focus resources on areas of concentrated risk in your vendor ecosystem.
Why choose continuous monitoring with Bitsight?
Clear visibility into security performance
Founded in 2011, Bitsight transforms how companies manage information security risk by providing objective, verifiable, and actionable security ratings. Today, 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, and 4 of the top 5 investment banks choose Bitsight technology to help manage cyber risk.
Bitsight offers:
- Greater visibility. Bitsight's technology provides extensive visibility into existing and emerging areas of risk, focusing on key areas of cyber risk that are correlated to breaches.
- Superior analytics. Bitsight analytics address peer comparison, digital risk exposure, predicting future performance, and other important cyber risk challenges.
- Quantifiable outcomes. Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.
- Wide industry adoption. Bitsight is the choice of more corporations, governments, banks, regulators, and insurers than any other Security Ratings solution.