Cyber Security Monitoring

Managing Vendor Risk with Cyber Security Monitoring

Continuous monitoring has long played a role in helping businesses to avoid unfavorable outcomes from cybersecurity threats. Today, many organizations are employing continuous cyber security monitoring to better remediate risk within their third-party networks.

Continuous monitoring is far more effective than traditional approaches that rely on yearly point-in-time assessments. By constantly aggregating data from a multitude of sources and analyzing it for trends and anomalies, continuous cyber security monitoring provides third-party risk managers with unprecedented insight into the risk and security performance of their third-party vendors.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management includes continuous monitoring capabilities that enable organizations to easily optimize third-party risk management programs and achieve significant and measurable cyber risk reduction.

Why continuous monitoring is essential

For years, third-party cyber risk assessment has relied on questionnaires completed yearly to evaluate the security posture of each vendor. Continuous cyber security monitoring offers significant advantages over these traditional risk management solutions. The benefits of continuous monitoring include:

• Daily assessment. Yearly assessments enable risk managers to gauge the risk posed by each vendor once every 12 months. Continuous monitoring provides a daily opportunity to reevaluate the security posture of each vendor and to take action when a vulnerability is detected.
• Objective information. Annual questionnaires are submitted by vendors themselves. Consequently, they offer a more subjective view of a vendor’s risk and are only as accurate as the person who completes the form. Continuous monitoring is based on objective, verifiable data, offering more context and helping to verify the accuracy of assessments submitted by vendors.
• Automated processes. Where questionnaires involve many manual processes, continuous monitoring is automated to minimize the burden on security teams and third-party risk managers.
• Faster evaluation. Annual assessments simply can’t keep pace with the speed with which cyber threats evolve and execute. Continuous monitoring enables organizations to identify threats much sooner and move more quickly to remediate them, offering greater digital risk protection.

Cyber Security Monitoring with Bitsight

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management includes continuous monitoring technology that gives vendor risk managers a complete and trusted view into their risk portfolio. Rather than relying on yearly assessments or security information submitted by vendors themselves, organizations can use Bitsight Security Ratings to continuously monitor the security status and posture of every vendor in their portfolio.

Bitsight Security Ratings provide a daily security score that reflects each vendor’s cybersecurity posture. Security Ratings are based on risk factors like botnet infections, filesharing behavior, out-of-date devices, TLS/SSL certificates, and other data. With Bitsight’s cyber security monitoring technology scanning each vendor’s security posture for changes in behavior or potential concerns, organizations get an updated, comprehensive view into risk within their third-party portfolio.

Bitsight Security Ratings have proven to correlate with the risk of data breaches. Research shows that a company’s overall rating, along with its grades in specific risk categories, can help to reliably predict security performance over time if conditions remain the same. Organizations can also rely on Bitsight ratings to create measurable value in vendor relationships. Additional research has shown that companies with strong cyber security performance and higher Bitsight ratings will financially outperform market peers by up to 7%.

Benefits of Continuous Cyber Security Monitoring

By implementing Bitsight and a strategy for continuous monitoring of third-party risk, organizations can:

• Gain greater visibility into vendor risk. By integrating continuous cyber security monitoring into the vendor risk landscape, risk managers get visibility beyond the obvious points of risk for each vendor. Daily Security Ratings may reveal critical external vulnerability data like on-premise cyber data, subsidiaries and geos, cloud data, firewalls, SIEMs, shadow IT, and remote office networks accessed by employees.
• Risk evaluation through the entire vendor lifecycle.. By adding continuous monitoring to the entire vendor risk management program, organizations can take advantage of automated, data-driven processes to evaluate risk during onboarding and throughout the vendor relationship.
• Provide executives and the board with reliable metrics and meaningful context. Continuous cyber security monitoring lets security managers deliver timelier and more accurate data to an organization’s leaders and board. Bitsight enables risk managers to share security benchmarks that can help to justify budgets, illuminate performance, and facilitate data-driven conversations around risk management.

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 is Cyber Security Monitoring of Third Parties?