Cyber Risk Strategy

Why a cyber risk strategy is more critical than ever

While cybersecurity spending has increased annually, so has the proliferation and sophistication of cyber-attacks . The cost of these security incidents is increasing as well. Governments have responded with a growing body of regulation meant to protect consumer data and strengthen organizational defenses. As a result, many organizations find themselves investing even more heavily in solutions to protect their IT environments and ensure compliance.

Clearly, a sophisticated cyber risk strategy is essential to protect organizations from evolving threats while also enabling compliance with cyber security regulations. The right strategy must not only provide a more secure business environment, but it must also deliver the transparency that regulators and corporate boards will require from security programs. A trusted strategy will bring cyber risk in line with all the other pressing business risks, instead of overusing business resources.

Bitsight Security Performance Management enables security and risk leaders to take a risk-based, outcome-driven approach cybersecurity performance management. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight supports security and risk teams as they develop a cyber risk strategy to measure and reduce risk through effective security controls.

Four guidelines for a sound cyber risk strategy

Successful cybersecurity programs require a fundamental paradigm shift when considering cyber risk strategies. Previously, strategies were centered around minimizing vulnerabilities and exposure. Cyber risk strategies today must be based on achieving specific outcomes and daily risk reduction – small, incremental improvements that enable teams to make larger proactive decisions as programs evolve.

An effective strategy will be governed by four guidelines.

• Sound program governance. Effective governance defines the policies and procedures that your company relies on to defend against cyber events and threats. Sound governance requires IT spending to be accurately mapped to business outcomes in order to evaluate the effectiveness of controls and security systems.
• Continuous monitoring. The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and risk detection and remediation efforts must evolve as well. Traditionally, evaluation of the effectiveness of security programs relied on periodic assessments. Today, a superior cyber risk strategy requires continuous monitoring of risk and the security programs designed to mitigate it.
• Daily assessment of priorities. Managing the integrity of your cybersecurity programs requires constant prioritization. Your ability to achieve and maintain internal performance standards and comply with external regulations requires that you assess your fundamentals on a day-to-day basis, actively managing your investments and resource allocations to address the most significant concerns, and adopting new technology or procedures as you can.
• Effective reporting. Building a mature security organization requires an effective reporting process with clearly defined and meaningful metrics. The ability to communicate in business terms – rather than with deeply technical terminology – will increase the confidence of board members and senior leadership while providing the KPIs and context required to enable better decision-making around investments in your cyber risk strategy.

Managing your cyber risk strategy with Bitsight

Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) provides businesses with the tools to develop a superior cyber risk strategy. Built on Bitsight’s industry-leading cybersecurity and data analytics, SPM facilitates organizational cyber risk oversight by delivering continuous visibility of the extended digital footprint and a differentiated view of the organization’s unique hierarchical structure.

Bitsight SPM delivers all the capabilities and security analytics that security and risk leaders need to develop and execute an effective cyber risk strategy.

Increased visibility

SPM enables evidence-based cyber risk monitoring that allows leaders to define performance standards for their organization and prioritize the work required to achieve them. Leveraging meaningful metrics and security ratings that are independently verified to correlate to breach risk, SPM provides the ability to view performance over time and guide the organization in efforts to reduce risk and achieve business outcomes.

Improved governance

Bitsight SPM helps to drive accountability across the organization based on uniform performance targets. Security leaders can develop performance targets based on the performance of customized peer groups and financially quantify cyber risk to set measurable exposure thresholds.

Enhanced management

To achieve performance targets, security teams can use Bitsight SPM to monitor performance cybersecurity controls throughout the organization, evaluate their effectiveness based on a best practices framework, and suggest actions to remediate any cybersecurity gaps. Security leaders can prioritize improvements to controls based on the impact on risk reduction. Bitsight’s Ratings Tree uniquely represents an organization’s unique hierarchical structure – including business units, subsidiaries, and geographical locations – to show how one entity is performing individually but also how it factors into overall company performance.

Effective assurance

Bitsight SPM enables security leaders to effectively communicate the performance of cybersecurity programs to the Board of Directors and other key stakeholders. Bitsight data analytics & cybersecurity reporting tools make it easy to compare security performance with customized peer groups, and to communicate the effectiveness of controls for each business unit.

Bitsight benefits for managing a cyber risk strategy

With Bitsight Security Performance Management, security and risk teams can:

• Drive accountability across the organization based on uniform performance targets.
• Deliver a financial analysis of cyber risk exposure with a turnkey solution.
• Improve the security performance of parent companies through analysis of each business unit.
• Continuously measure the effectiveness of security controls.
• Leverage prescriptive analytics and an asset risk matrix to prioritize allocation decisions.
• Inspire confidence in security programs by effectively communicating analytics and improvements to executives and board members.
• Quickly export an executive summary of program performance over time.
• Use meaningful metrics that can be understood by technical and non-technical stakeholders alike to create a shared understanding of cyber risk standards and performance.
• Easily compare the results of a cyber risk strategy to other top-performing organizations.

Why 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.