Cybersecurity Best Practices

Transforming Our Cybersecurity Best Practices

It’s a time of immense change for security leaders. Even before the pandemic sent companies scrambling to make their networks for an at-home workforce, along with other business disruptions, security teams faced significant challenges. Threats and security risks have been constantly growing in volume and sophistication. The number of breaches continues to rise, despite close adherence to cybersecurity best practices. Security leaders are under increasing scrutiny from boards and executives who want more ROI for their security investments. Yet, teams often have difficulty measuring the effectiveness of security efforts and risk reduction programs.

In these volatile times – when security leaders face pressure to deliver results faster and with less resources – it’s no longer possible to rely on traditional cybersecurity best practices. As they examine their security programs and implement changes, organizations need new strategies, methods, and solutions that can deliver measurable results with less effort and fewer resources.

Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading security ratings service, Bitsight provides a suite of solutions that enable security teams to follow new cybersecurity best practices for improving security posture and managing risk more effectively.

Four Best Practices for Cybersecurity

In this evolving cybersecurity climate, there are several cybersecurity best practices that are essential to delivering results on shrinking budgets.

• Measure impact, not just accomplishment. When tracking cyber risk metrics, security leaders too often focus on accomplishments rather than the impact of their programs on the business. For example, tracking and reporting on the number of network penetrations prevented in a given month is helpful for evaluating security performance or informing cybersecurity policy, but it’s not enough. Security leaders should include how well programs are aligned with business objectives and what the real value of security programs are to the bottom line when they are measuring program effectiveness.
• Manage the expanding attack surface. The traditional network perimeter has disappeared. As more employees work from home or remote locations, the organization’s attack surface is rapidly expanding. Security teams must quickly move to get visibility into this new digital ecosystem to uncover shadow IT, inventory old URLs or domains, understand third-party risk, and remediate risk exposure of home networks. It’s only with accurate and comprehensive visibility into the entire attack surface that security teams can start adapting cybersecurity best practices for this “new normal.”
• Focus on risk rather than threats. Traditional security programs have viewed the world as a threat landscape. This perspective led to significant investments in technologies and tools without a clear sense of how they would benefit the business. In a world where digital ecosystems include cloud services, remote networks, and vast numbers of vendors, a focus on risk offers a more proactive approach to security. By focusing on identifying risk and implementing controls to mitigate it over focuses on individual network vulnerabilities, security leaders can generate actionable and proactive plans and deliver more meaningful KPIs to track the impact of security programs.
• Optimize for cost and efficiency. As their budgets shrink, security leaders can accomplish more through automation. Rather than managing third-party risk with manual security compliance questionnaires, for example, risk teams can automate third-party onboarding and security assessment with tools for continuously monitoring the security posture of thousands of vendors. Automated tools for vulnerability assessment and attack surface monitoring can help security teams spot the gaps in controls and make asset inventories more complete.

Bitsight: Technology for Cybersecurity Best Practices

Bitsight transforms how companies manage security and risk by providing objective, verifiable, and actionable security ratings. As security teams establish new cybersecurity best practices, Bitsight’s technology delivers the visibility, metrics, and automation to improve security posture and manage risk more effectively.

Bitsight has revolutionized cybersecurity with a data-driven, outside-in approach to security ratings. Bitsight continuously measures the security performance of thousands of organizations to generate daily ratings that reveal how effective a company’s cybersecurity processes are, and how risky they are to work with as a business. Bitsight Security Ratings are calculated using a proprietary algorithm to continuously analyze vast amounts of external security data. By monitoring information on compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches, Bitsight can accurately measure the security performance of organizations and their vendors.

With Bitsight Security Ratings and Bitsight’s suite of security solutions, organizations have the tools they need to measure performance, visualize attack surfaces, identify risk, and automate processes for greater effectiveness and cost-efficiency.

Solutions for Cybersecurity Best Practices

Bitsight offers a suite of technologies that leverage Security Ratings to help organizations better manage risk and improve security performance.

• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management automates and simplifies the task of identifying and managing risk in vendor relationships. With Bitsight, security teams can easily identify cyber risk within their supply chain with data that corresponds to potential security incidents. Bitsight helps to automate third-party security assessments and validate the information a vendor is providing, as well as ensure that vendors are following cybersecurity best practices such as complying with PCI security standards.
• Bitsight for Security Performance Management provides the tools for tracking and improving security program performance over time. Using Bitsight Security Ratings, this Bitsight solution offers continuous monitoring to provide visibility into an expanding digital footprint and identify gaps in security programs. Armed with actionable metrics, security teams can better prioritize remediation efforts and quantify the impact of security investments.
• Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics lets security teams continuously discover and segment the assets, devices, and applications within a growing digital footprint. Through a centralized dashboard, security leaders can view and secure digital assets, discover shadow IT, and visualize areas of concentrated risk.
• Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking helps organizations assess and contextualize their security posture by benchmarking performance against industry peers and competitors. Bitsight helps to measure the impact of risk mitigation efforts and lets security leaders report progress and results to executives and boards more effectively.

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 are Cybersecurity Best Practices?