A new era of cybersecurity performance management
Cybersecurity-related risk is now rated as the second highest source of risk for the enterprise. The stakes are enormous: a cybersecurity breach can result in significant financial harm, damage to reputation, loss of customers’ trust, and loss of data and intellectual property.
Cybersecurity performance management solutions help your organization drive accountability for security outcomes and align investments and actions with the highest measurable impact over time. Ideally, your security performance management program should enable security and risk leaders to efficiently allocate limited resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk. Yet, traditional methods for managing risk and monitoring performance have relied on penetration testing, cyber threat intelligence, and periodic security assessments. These methods only include point-in-time metrics that can’t provide a continuous view of how security programs are performing.
Bitsight offers a modern, more effective way to develop your cyber risk strategy and manage security performance. Bitsight for Security Performance Management (SPM) enables continuous monitoring of security performance through daily security ratings that offer clear, objective, data-driven measurements.
How security ratings work
CIOs, CISOs, and other security and risk leaders are constantly required to answer critical security questions:
- How secure is the organization?
- Is security improving over time?
- Are investments in cybersecurity paying off?
- Is the company more or less secure than industry peers?
To answer these questions, security teams have traditionally relied on periodic audits, assessments, and legacy benchmarking methods to quantify cyber risk and measure the effectiveness of security controls. These security analytics often require a great deal of time to aggregate complex metrics, yet the point-in-time results they produce are outdated almost immediately.
Security ratings provide an alternative way to manage cybersecurity performance and to communicate risk to senior executives and board members in a way that’s easy to understand. Security ratings are based on externally observable and verifiable data that’s collected and analyzed daily. Unlike security assessment tools that review a company’s policies or conduct periodic scans, security ratings are based on objective evidence of an organization’s compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. The result is an objective, evidence-based measure of performance that provides clear insight into the effectiveness of security programs and controls.
Armed with daily ratings, you can proactively identify, quantify, and manage cybersecurity risk throughout your ecosystem. Security ratings provide a common language that can be appreciated by both technical and non-technical individuals, facilitating conversations between cybersecurity professionals and executives and board members to improve decision-making around security investments.
