Cyber Security and Risk Management

The value of measurement in cyber security and risk management

Cyber risk is an ever-present fact of life in today’s business environment. To improve their cyber security, organizations need better visibility into where risk exists in their own ecosystem – and with their third-party landscape. With a clear picture of the risk landscape, business leaders can make better decisions about how to prioritize cybersecurity investments and what controls to adopt to mitigate risk.

Continuous monitoring is key to managing risk over time. With a constant view into the effectiveness of security programs, organizations can refine risk management efforts to address new vulnerabilities as well as breakdowns in controls and security hygiene.

BitSight can help. With solutions and tools for continuous monitoring, broad measurement, and detailed planning and forecasting, BitSight gives organizations clear insight into the performance of their security programs and helps improve planning for cyber security and risk management.

The five key elements in managing cyber security performance

Cyber security and risk management are priority #1 for CISOs today. Security practices, outcomes, and organizational failures are constantly under scrutiny by boards, partners, regulators, and investors. Traditional point-in-time operational metrics are no longer adequate for measuring security performance. These approaches lack context, are difficult to interpret, leave too many gaps, and are not relevant to how businesses think about cybersecurity performance. Superior cyber security and risk management require a standard, objective, independent, and quantitative metric to evaluate the effectiveness of security efforts over time.

A successful cyber security and risk management strategy must include five key elements:

1. KPIs like security ratings can provide a common language to define risk tolerance and how you’ll define success
2. Planning can help to align your program to key areas of focus for risk reduction across the business.
3. Allocating and prioritizing resources in the right places to focus efforts on key areas of improvement.
4. Continuous monitoring can identify new risk or control failures, allowing you to address issues and establish SLA’s for remediation with vendors.
5. Reporting can establish a regular measurement cadence to understand how controls are having an impact over time and where adjustments are necessary.

These key elements of a mature cyber security and risk management program deliver greater security visibility. They also allow organizations to shift from a reactive state to a proactive approach using independent, objective, and data-driven methods to evaluate performance.

BitSight for Security Performance Management

BitSight for Security Performance Management provides an outcome-driven approach to cyber security and risk management. With BitSight, security and risk leaders can reduce cyber risk through greater visibility into their program’s security performance. CISOs and their organizations can efficiently allocate resources to the greatest areas of cyber risk and the programs that will deliver the highest impact over time.

BitSight for Security Performance Management provides comprehensive tools for cyber security and risk management.

• Attack surface analytics enable organizations to manage their digital footprint and assess cyber risk exposure throughout the digital ecosystem.
• Internal assessments expose how an organization’s security posture is viewed by others.
• Benchmarking establishes baseline metrics and performance against industry peers.
• Executive reporting effectively indicates key metrics to stakeholders through customized, actionable reports.
• Forecasting suggests future ratings based on the details of a cyber security plan and makes it easy to track progress toward goals over time.
• Peer analytics provide an in-depth view of how an organization compares to other similar organizations.
• NIST & ISO framework mapping correlates an organization’s results to broadly adopted security frameworks.

Benefits for cyber security performance and risk management

With BitSight for Security Performance Management, organizations can:

• Maintain continuous visibility into an expanding digital footprint.
• Identify gaps in cyber security and risk management programs through continuous monitoring.
• Drive accountability for security outcomes throughout the organization.
• Ensure that investments in security controls are efficient and effective.
• Improve visibility into cyber risk across all digital assets.
• Prioritize remediation efforts and cybersecurity budgets based on risk.
• Measure and quantify the impact and effectiveness of security investments.
• Enhance the effectiveness of security tools, technologies, and people through more informed decision-making.
• Continuously improve the organization’s cyber health.

Why choose BitSight?

BitSight is the leader in Security Ratings that enable some of the world’s largest organizations to have a clear understanding of their security posture. With the most widely adopted Security Ratings solution, BitSight helps to protect more than 1700 customers worldwide, including all the Big 4 accounting firms, 25% of Fortune 500 companies and 20% of the countries in the world.

BitSight Security Ratings provide greater cybersecurity visibility, enabling security teams to clearly identify key areas of cyber risk. BitSight has the most engaged community of cyber risk interactions across 170,000 actively monitored organizations. And BitSight provides a larger view into a company’s attack surface, giving organizations an easy and visual way to prioritize remediation for their largest areas of cyber risk.

FAQs: What is the key to effective cyber security and risk management?