Cyber Risk Metrics

What are cyber risk metrics?

Cyber risk metrics provide information about areas of risk within an organization and the performance of controls established to mitigate risk. Along with cybersecurity analytics, risk metrics enable security teams to determine the effectiveness of security controls and processes over time and identify areas for improvement.

Improving security with cyber risk metrics

Cyber risk metrics are critical to professionals in cyber security and risk management. The right metrics enable security teams to identify risk and establish controls to mitigate it. Metrics also allow organizations to measure the success of cybersecurity programs over time and take action to improve them.

Too often, however, the cyber risk metrics or cloud security metrics that organizations rely on are either overly complex or too vague to facilitate data-driven conversations around cyber risk. Many metrics are presented without context, making it impossible for security teams to rely on this data when prioritizing efforts and investments.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight Security Ratings use externally observable and verifiable data to provide an instantaneous, point-in-time snapshot of an organization’ s overall security posture. By continuously monitoring the security performance of their organization and the security posture of vendors, cyber risk professionals can create cybersecurity plans, track progress over time, and improve their overall security performance.

The benefits of Security Ratings for cyber risk metrics

With Bitsight Security Ratings, organizations can:

• Benchmark security performance against industry peers to better prioritize security actions and investments and to communicate KPIs to boards and executives more clearly.
• Measure and mitigate third-party risk with continuous security monitoring that can easily scale to accommodate business growth.
• Make security risk decisions with greater speed and effectiveness through alerts, reporting, and intelligence. Engage stakeholders and third parties in data-driven conversations about risk and security programs.

Bitsight Security Ratings deliver objective cyber risk metrics

Bitsight Security Ratings use objective, verifiable data to measure an organization’s security performance. Thousands of organizations around the world use Bitsight Security Ratings to deliver cyber risk metrics that help proactively identify, quantify, and manage cyber risk throughout their ecosystem.

In contrast to security assessment tools that conduct periodic scans or evaluate a company’s policies, Bitsight continuously measures security performance based on externally observable data. Bitsight ratings are based on evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches within an organization. This data-driven, outside-in approach requires no questionnaires to be completed and no information to be provided by an organization. With cyber risk monitoring and daily Security Ratings from Bitsight, organizations have the cyber risk metrics they need to seamlessly identify and measure risk and security performance.

The benefits for cyber risk management

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides risk managers with:

• A trusted view of third-party risk. Rather than relying on yearly assessments and security information provided by vendors, risk managers can trust Bitsight’s continuous monitoring capabilities to provide an objective view of each vendor’s security status.
• Objective and verifiable information. Bitsight Security Ratings are based on objective, verifiable data and have been proven to correlate with a risk of data breaches. If they remain unchanged, a company’s overall Bitsight rating and its grades in given risk categories can reliably predict future security performance. With this information, organizations can protect against vendors who have a higher likelihood of experiencing a cyberattack.
• Customized monitoring options. The ability to select the best level of continuous monitoring for each vendor promotes efficiency without overspending on cyber risk management efforts.
• Tools to respond to vendors’ security incidents. When a new incident occurs or a vulnerability is detected, Bitsight not only alerts the organization but enables collaboration with vendors to quickly and efficiently remediate the issue.

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.

FAQs: What are cyber risk metrics?