The Benefits Of Cyber Security Risk Assessment Reports
Reporting plays a critical role in security risk assessment. By providing metrics that measure the presence of risk in your digital ecosystem and the effectiveness of your risk management decisions and processes, your cyber risk reports can help you prioritize your remediation efforts to focus on the areas of greatest risk and the actions that will have the most impact.
Too often, however, a cyber security risk assessment report provides too little or too much information to be useful. Reports that deliver numbers without insights or context are likely to be overlooked, and reports that are too technical will are unhelpful to executives and board members who lack the in-depth knowledge of cybersecurity.
Bitsight can help. With powerful reporting capabilities and the most widely adopted security ratings platform, Bitsight makes it easy to generate cyber security risk assessment reports that serve the needs of every stakeholder while minimizing the time required from security leaders and risk managers.
Preparing A Cyber Security Risk Assessment Report
Following several best practices can help to ensure that your cyber security risk assessment reports are meaningful, easy to understand, and helpful to stakeholders throughout the organization. When preparing your reports, be sure to:
- Convey actionable information in context. Put findings in context by comparing metrics to past performance, peers, and competitors. Include information on what’s at stake financially based on your current risk posture. Compare your findings to standard cybersecurity frameworks for your industry.
- Keep key findings concise. Summarize critical findings and place the highest risk items front and center in the report.
- Make the language clear for a non-technical audience. Avoid jargon and overly technical language for reports being shown to executives and areas of the business outside of cybersecurity. Use a risk score to make key findings and recommendations easier to understand.
- Relate findings to cyber risk. Risk-based reporting is the approach that’s best suited to reducing your organization’s actual exposure to cyber threats. Following a risk-based approach can help everyone in the organization focus on the most significant issues. Framing risk in business terms can help executives and leaders to understand the ramifications of your findings.
Assessing Risk With Bitsight Security Ratings
Bitsight enables your security leaders and risk managers to quickly and easily produce cyber security risk assessment reports that follow best practices while promoting efficiency throughout your cybersecurity program. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities are based on information available from Bitsight Security Ratings, which are an external, objective measurement of an organization’s security performance. Similar to credit ratings that evaluate companies based on external information, Bitsight Security Ratings are produced by analyzing objective, verifiable data about an organization’s security posture.
Security Ratings data is collected from 120+ sources that cover 23 different risk vectors. Bitsight uses a proprietary algorithm to analyze and classify externally observable data concerning compromised systems, issues with security diligence, potentially risky user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Ratings are a simple, quantitative metric and range from 250 to 900 – the higher the number, the better the overall security posture of the organization, and the lower likelihood of bad actors successfully infiltrating the network.
Research shows that Bitsight Security Ratings are proven to correlate to the risk of a data breach. For example, companies with a rating of 500 or lower are nearly 5 times more likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 700 or higher.
Armed with Bitsight Security Ratings, your teams can generate cyber security risk assessment reports that provide a clear view of your company’s security performance and the security posture of your third-party vendors.
Bitsight’s Reporting Capabilities
Based on Bitsight Security Ratings, Bitsight reports allow your cybersecurity and risk management teams to communicate more effectively with executives, board members, partners, vendors, and each other. Bitsight’s reporting interface makes it easy to find the reports you need and to present the metrics and context that are most meaningful for each conversation with different stakeholders.
Bitsight cyber security risk assessment reports are grouped into broad categories to help get you started, including.
- Overview and executive reporting. Executives, board members, and other company decision-makers need reports that communicate straightforward facts about security performance in relation to the overall business, risk within vendor networks, plans for remediation, and ROI on previous investments. In third-party risk management, these reports summarize risk across the vendor portfolio, help managers determine risk of specific vendors in relation to each other, which can contribute to the tier a vendor is placed into, and show how to mitigate third party risk most effectively.
- History and trends. These include cyber security risk assessment reports that provide a detailed look at how all aspects of security programs stack up against those of competitors, partners, vendors, and industry leaders. Benchmarking reports provides insights into how well security performance measures up to industry leaders, helping security teams to set goals more effectively.
Additional Bitsight reports include findings and infrastructure details that focus specifically on domain and platform construction, behavior of threats in your system, and how your organization is using the Bitsight platform. Reports about risk assessment questionnaires help guide organizations as they prepare for and complete assessments like the NIST CSF and ISO/IEC 27001 questionnaires.
In addition to reports, solutions like Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provide an at-a-glance view of risk in dashboards and in a cyber security risk assessment matrix or a vendor portfolio overview report. These solutions provide highly effective tools to help security and risk leaders identify and assess risk and prioritize remediation efforts.
Why Choose Bitsight?
Since 2011, Bitsight has pioneered the security ratings industry with the most widely adopted security ratings solution. With security ratings that enable continuous monitoring and superior information technology risk assessment, Bitsight helps organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about cybersecurity policy and third-party cyber risk management.
Today, Bitsight is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to provide a clearer picture of their security posture. Among Bitsight’s 2,100+ customers are 20% of the world’s countries, 25% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.