Information security presentation

The value of risk-based information security presentations

As the cybersecurity landscape evolves more quickly than ever, effective communication between security professionals, executives and the Board is essential for preventing security incidents. Too often, however, cyber security presentations provide numbers and data without the insight or context that allow stakeholders to draw accurate and helpful conclusions from the information. Reports are often too voluminous, too incomplete, or too technical to be effective, preventing the kind of communication that can focus resources and align efforts to prevent a breach.

BitSight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, BitSight offers solutions for risk-based reporting that can enable information security presentations to be simpler and more insightful. BitSight helps security professionals to provide cyber security information with actionable context, highlighting the value of cybersecurity efforts and ensuring that their organization is getting the most out of limited time and resources.

Elements of risk-based security presentation

Risk-based reporting is an approach to communication that is best suited to reducing an organization’s actual exposure to cyber threats. By preparing risk-based information security presentations, security teams can focus attention and resources on the most significant issues to ensure optimal progress toward improving security posture.

Context is critical for risk-based information security presentations. Metrics presented in a vacuum are difficult to understand and rarely actionable. For example, knowing that a firewall has stopped 1200 potential intrusions means nothing without context that reveals whether that number is high, low, or average. Context can include everything from security benchmarking that compares current and past performance to financial quantification of cyber risk or information on how current efforts align to standard cybersecurity frameworks.

Additionally, the elements of a risk-based information security presentation may include:

• Reports that place the highest-risk items front and center.
• Risk scores attached to key findings or recommendations.
• Risk framed in business terms to help executives and leaders understand the ramifications of metrics.
• Frequent reporting on critical items, or the use of continuous monitoring dashboards that keep the most important metrics in front of stakeholders.

The BitSight Security Ratings platform

BitSight Security Ratings empower businesses with the insight to seamlessly identify and measure cyber risk – and to communicate with stakeholders via risk-based information security presentations.

BitSight Security Ratings are a data-driven measurement of an organization’s security performance. Like credit ratings, BitSight’s ratings are generated through analysis of externally observable data – no information is required from rated entities. This outside-in approach ensures a more accurate and objective assessment of security performance. In fact, BitSight ratings are the only security ratings proven to correlate with risk of data breach.

BitSight produces daily ratings for over 540,000 organizations. Each day, BitSight processes 250 billion security measurements gathered from 120+ sources. This data concerns 23 key risk vectors that fall into four major categories: evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Using a proprietary algorithm, BitSight issues a rating from 250 to 900 for each organization, with higher numbers correlating with stronger security performance. In addition to this overall score, BitSight’s ratings can provide granular detail about risks and vulnerabilities across an organization’s attack surface.

Through daily security ratings, centralized dashboards, and reporting tools, BitSight enables security teams to simplify reporting and deliver risk-based information security presentations. These reports can improve security posture by facilitating the communication that can focus investments and align resources to deliver the highest impact. BitSight’s ratings also enable more accurate security assessments, third-party risk assessments, and cloud security audits.

BitSight solutions for information security presentations

BitSight delivers a suite of solutions based on industry-leading security ratings that support risk-based reporting and more effective information security presentations.

BitSight Executive Reports

BitSight Executive Reports simplify the task of compiling metrics for risk-based information security presentations. BitSight Security Ratings and metrics can be easily understood by everyone in the organization, including individuals without a technical background. Users can create custom reports on the fly or leverage readily available reports and cybersecurity executive summary examples to produce reports quickly. BitSight makes it easy to pull a wide range of metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard that reveals granular detail on compromised systems and vulnerabilities, security diligence and protocols, user behavior risks, and network infrastructure.

BitSight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

BitSight provides the quantified baseline and comparative data that’s essential for security benchmarking. By continuously analyzing, rating, and monitoring the security posture of companies and their vendors, BitSight enables organizations to measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to industry peers, and communicate key indicators to the Board.

BitSight Financial Quantification of Enterprise Cyber Risk

This BitSight solution provides the business context and data-driven metrics to quantify cyber risk financially. By analyzing potential financial exposure across multiple types of cyber events and impact scenarios, BitSight helps organizations make better, faster decisions on how to prioritize investments for risk reduction.

Why choose BitSight?

Founded in 2011, BitSight is the leading security ratings service and is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to provide a clear picture of their security posture as well as risk in their third-party ecosystem. BitSight security ratings enable organizations to benchmark their own security performance and serve as a complement to traditional solutions like SIEM monitoring and point-in-time vendor self-assessments.

The BitSight platform is used by 2,100+ customers worldwide to monitor 540,000 organizations. BitSight is trusted by 20% of the world’s countries to protect national security, and 25% of Fortune 500 companies rely on BitSight as well. More than 40 government agencies, including U.S. and global financial regulators, trust BitSight’s daily security ratings. BitSight is also the choice of 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.