Cybersecurity Controls

How effective are your cybersecurity controls?

On the surface, building effective security management programs is fairly straightforward: security teams must identify risks and threats, and implement cybersecurity controls to prevent or minimize them.

In practice, however, the task of managing cybersecurity controls is far more complex. Organizations often lack visibility into their attack surfaces and the expansive and variety of risks they face. Determining which controls to use and how to configure them is a continual challenge. Controls must be continually monitored, measured, and reconfigured to respond to an ever-evolving threat landscape.

Bitsight can help. By relying on Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings and a comprehensive suite of technologies for managing risk, security teams and organizations can deploy cybersecurity controls with greater confidence and using less resources.

Choosing the right security controls

One of the greatest challenges for security teams is knowing which cybersecurity controls to implement. Following several critical cybersecurity best practices can help to ensure you deploy the best mix of physical, operational, and management controls.

1. Know what you’re protecting. The first priority for any security leader is to understand the data they’re required to protect. Knowing which data is most valuable, where it exists, and who has access to it can help to determine the information security controls required to protect it.
2. Prioritize controls based on data sensitivity. Security managers must strictly prioritize efforts to maximize the effectiveness of constrained or shrinking security budgets. Ranking sensitive data, like employee or customer financial or personal information, as high priority can help to decide where to focus efforts and resources first.
3. Engage senior executives and the board. Boards and senior leadership are increasingly taking a more active role in oversight of cybersecurity and establishment of cybersecurity standards. Success of any cybersecurity program – and the controls required to support it – will depend in part on receiving buy-in and budget from senior leadership. Superior reporting capabilities can facilitate this effort immensely.
4. Know your environment. Deciding which policies, products, and cybersecurity controls will best serve your needs requires a thorough understanding of your IT environment. Complete visibility into your attack surface and digital ecosystem is critical – including what cloud services, shadow IT, and vendor networks are connected to your data, as well as where remote/home network connections are present.
5. Engage the workforce. Employees are one of the weakest links in your cybersecurity efforts. Understanding their needs and behavior, and providing the proper cybersecurity training and required actions in their contracts are great cybersecurity controls to require to help protect against human error and shadow IT.

Managing cybersecurity controls with Bitsight

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the insight you need to seamlessly identify and measure cyber risk – and deploy the cybersecurity controls to address it. Bitsight Security Ratings are an external, data-backed measurement of an organization’s security performance. With an outside-in approach that’s similar to credit ratings, Bitsight continuously measures security performance based on objective, verifiable data that is connected to an organization’s likelihood of experiencing a data breach. From evidence of compromised systems and data breaches to information on security diligence and user behavior, Bitsight analyzes vast amounts of externally observable data to generate daily security ratings for organizations and their vendors.

With help from Bitsight, you can easily identify risk, determine which cybersecurity controls are necessary to prevent it, and measure the effectiveness of controls over time.

Bitsight’s comprehensive solutions

Bitsight Security Ratings are the foundation for a suite of solutions that can help you follow best practices for implementing cybersecurity controls.

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management offers a risk-based, outcome-driven approach to managing performance of cybersecurity controls and programs. With Bitsight as your cyber security assessment tool, you can use broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting to measurably reduce cyber risk.
• Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics provides visibility into your complete digital ecosystem and the risks associated with each asset in your attack surface. Bitsight helps you discover hidden assets and cloud instances, visualize areas of disproportionate risk, and implement the appropriate security controls to remediate them.
• Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking offers an effective way to monitor your cybersecurity posture and benchmark your performance against competitors and peers. With Bitsight, you can measure the impact of your cybersecurity controls and risk mitigation efforts, and report on progress and results more clearly and effectively.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management exposes risk in your supply chain to help you prioritize resources and achieve significant and measurable cyber risk reduction. Bitsight offers insight into where exactly the riskiest issues impacting your vendors live in your network landscape, and helps to ensure they’re complying with cyber security regulations like PCI security standards. Ultimately, Bitsight helps to optimize your third-party risk management program with the resources you have today.

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 controls?