Cyber Risk Assessment

Visualizing risk with ongoing cyber risk assessments

As data breaches continue to wreak havoc and grab headlines, organizations are looking for more effective ways to identify and mitigate cyber risk and cyber liability. Traditional cyber risk assessments are time-consuming and limited in the information they provide, providing only a point-in-time snapshot of security performance. To keep pace with the rapid evolution of cybersecurity threats, organizations must be able to assess their security posture on a continuous basis, identifying and detecting unknown risk hiding in their digital ecosystems.

BitSight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, BitSight delivers much-needed visibility into an organization’s overall security posture as well as liabilities and risk in its attack surface. With BitSight tools for cyber risk assessment, security teams and risk managers can make faster, more strategic decisions about remediation and how to focus resources for optimal impact.

The challenge of assessing cyber risk

Digital ecosystems today are constantly expanding, creating new obstacles for security teams as they conduct cyber risk assessments and work to maintain a strong security posture.

Incomplete visibility

It’s harder than ever today to get a clear view of risk. Cloud infrastructure, mergers and acquisitions, and geographically dispersed business units make the corporate digital footprint more complex and dynamic. Not to mention an onslaught of connectivity from work from home devices combined with increasing reliance on third parties to perform necessary business operations complicating your network even more. It’s difficult for many organizations to simply create an inventory of critical assets, let alone assess the risks that are associated with them.

Lack of context

To maximize the impact of available resources and get the greatest return on investment (ROI) for security initiatives, organizations must allocate resources based on the severity of risk associated with each asset. Without the right tools, however, security teams rarely have the context they need to identify the most critical risks or potentially severe security events. As a result, prioritizing remediation efforts relies on guesswork more than data-driven decisions.

No common language

Disparate systems and teams within an organization typically lack a common language for discussing cybersecurity, KPIs, vulnerabilities, and issues. Without a standard set of KPIs, organizations find it difficult to implement cyber risk best practices, measure performance, track improvement, and determine whether resources are being used effectively.

To overcome these challenges, organizations need continuous visibility into assets and the risk they may be hiding. That’s where BitSight can help.

The BitSight Security Ratings platform

BitSight transforms how companies manage risk by providing objective, verifiable, and actionable Security Ratings. BitSight ratings empower organizations to accurately assess their current security posture and set achievable targets for improvement.

BitSight’s Security Ratings are a common indicator of an organization’s overall cyber risk portfolio. Ratings provide an easy-to-understand cyber risk analysis that can be used to communicate essential insight and program effectiveness for board members, executives, and customers.

BitSight provides an overall rating for organizations that ranges from 250 to 900. The higher the rating, the stronger the organization’s security posture. To enable a more accurate and objective cyber risk assessment, ratings are based on externally verifiable information rather than an organization’s self-assessments. BitSight ratings are calculated using a proprietary algorithm that analyzes data drawn from 120+ sources, covering 23 key risk vectors in 4 major categories of cybersecurity data. These include evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches.

Security performance and risk coming from third-parties

BitSight’s Security Ratings enable organizations to accurately measure their own security performance on an ongoing basis. By exposing risk in vendors’ digital ecosystems, BitSight ratings simplify third-party cyber risk management and operational risk management to improve supply chain security.

Simplified reporting

BitSight also simplifies communication around security and risk. BitSight Executive Reports make cyber risk assessments understandable and accessible for board members and executives. Security and risk managers can quickly pull easily understood metrics that show security performance at a high level, or in granular detail. Security teams can use a variety of cyber security risk assessment report samples and templates or create custom reports on the fly.

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics, part of the BitSight Security Performance Management suite of solutions, helps security teams to validate a digital footprint, conduct a cyber risk assessment, and identify how to quickly remediate vulnerabilities. By providing additional context around the organization’s security rating, this BitSight solution makes it easier to pinpoint specific risks decide where to focus cybersecurity efforts.

Visualize digital assets

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics provides unprecedented insight into digital assets across all ecosystem endpoints. BitSight automatically discovers assets, identifying location and prioritizing associated risks for quick remediation.

Uncover shadow IT

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics helps security teams discover unknown assets known as shadow IT – technology solutions that are procured or spun up by functional teams and individuals without IT’s knowledge or standard vetting. BitSight helps identify any associated cyber risks and enforces appropriate security policies to bring shadow IT in line.

Monitor hidden risk

BitSight Attack Surface Analytics gives security teams continuous, broad visibility and context into the attack surface in the cloud across all hosting providers. By shining a spotlight on the security of cloud-hosted assets, BitSight helps reveal unknown vulnerabilities, infections, and misconfiguration that could lead to a breach.

Why choose BitSight for cyber risk assessments?

BitSight is the most widely adopted security ratings solution and is trusted by some of the largest organizations in the world to deliver a clear picture of their security posture. Since 2011, BitSight has pioneered the security ratings market, transforming the way that companies evaluate security performance and third-party risk. Through continuous monitoring and cyber risk assessment, BitSight enables organizations to make faster and more strategic decisions about cyber security and risk management.

BitSight is trusted by 20% of the world countries to protect national security, and is used by 40+ government agencies, including U.S. and global financial regulators. Additionally, BitSight is the choice of 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.