Cyber Security Policy Examples

Drafting cyber security policy from examples

Establishing cyber security policy is an essential part of protecting organizations against cyber risk. As the landscape of cyber threats rapidly evolves, cyber security policies must adapt at an equal pace to help organizations avoid security incidents and major breaches.

Security and risk teams don’t need to draft cyber security policy from scratch. There are plenty of security frameworks and guidelines that provide excellent cyber security policy examples. However, security policy must be created in coordination with the Board and C-suite – and that task can be more complicated.

Many executives and Board members lack the technical background to develop or approve cyber security policy based on highly technical reports and presentations. To get the buy-in of organizational leadership, security and risk managers must communicate risks, security performance gaps, and recommendations for remediation in business terms that everyone can understand.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight Executive Reporting provides tools that make security performance understandable and accessible to senior leadership, driving more productive conversations about cyber risk as well as cyber security policies.

Common frameworks for cyber security policy examples

When looking for recommendations and examples of cyber security policy, these common frameworks make it easier to define the processes and procedures organizations can take to assess, monitor, and remediate cyber security risk.

  • NIST Cybersecurity Framework – The gold standard for a cybersecurity maturity model, identifying security gaps, and meeting cyber security regulations.
  • ISO 27001 and ISO 27002 – The international standard for validating cyber security programs internally and across third parties.
  • SOC2 – A trust-based framework and auditing standard to help verify that vendors and partners are managing client data securely.
  • NERC-CIP - A set of cyber security standards designed to help companies in the utility and power sector reduce risk and ensure the reliability of electric systems.
  • HIPAA – A security framework that requires healthcare organizations to implement controls for securing and protecting the privacy of health information.v
  • GDPR - A European Union regulation that strengthens data protection procedures and practices for EU citizens, impacting organizations anywhere in the world that collect and store the private data of EU citizens.
  • FISMA – A comprehensive cyber security framework that protects U.S. federal government information and systems against cyber threats.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

Bitsight Security Ratings are a data-driven, objective measurement of the security posture of an organization and its third-party vendors. Security Ratings provide continuous measurement of the organization’s security performance and the risk within its supply chain. With insight gleaned from Bitsight’s cybersecurity ratings, organizations can make faster and more strategic decisions about cyber security policy.

Bitsight Security Ratings are informed by data drawn from 120+ sources that provides insight into 23 risk vectors in four categories of security: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and data breaches. Security ratings are calculated daily and range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – higher numbers indicate a stronger security posture and correlate to financial performance.

Bitsight Security Ratings play multiple roles in managing cyber security policy. For example, organizations can use Bitsight ratings to measure the effectiveness of a policy over time. Because Bitsight provides detailed cyber security assessment information about vulnerabilities such as botnet infections, malware servers, spam propagation, open ports, patching cadence, filesharing, and exposed credentials, security and risk team can also use Bitsight ratings to create and revise policy based on comprehensive visibility into the adapting risks within its digital ecosystem.

Setting cyber security policy with Bitsight

Bitsight Executive Reporting provides tools that help security and risk managers quickly and easily compile metrics for reports to executives and the Board. By making security performance reports accessible and contextual, Bitsight helps organizations review the effectiveness of cyber security policies with summaries of where the program successfully mitigated risk as well as where threats and vulnerabilities need remediation.

Executive Reports can provide information at a high level or with granular detail about compromised systems, vulnerabilities, security diligence, user behavior risks, network infrastructure, and domain infrastructure. Reporting in the Bitsight platform is intuitive, and users do not need specific technical knowledge to create reports. Reports can be customized by your security team looking to communicate specific points, or can generated from more than a dozen readily available reports, making it easy to communicate with leadership about the security performance of the organization and its vendor portfolio.

Why choose Bitsight?

Bitsight transforms how organizations manage information security risk with objective, verifiable, and actionable security ratings. Founded in 2011, Bitsight today is the world’s leading Security Ratings service. By delivering comprehensive security visibility and reviewing how well an attack surface is protected from cyber security threats, Bitsight helps organizations and their third-party vendors improve security posture and manage risk more effectively.

With the Bitsight platform, over 3,000 customers monitor over 540,000 organizations to collectively reduce cyber risk. Fully 25% of Fortune 500 companies use Bitsight cyber risk ratings to get a clearer picture of their security posture, and Bitsight is trusted by 20% of the world’s countries to protect national security.

Get a personalized demo to find out how Bitsight can help you solve your most pressing security and risk challenges.