Operational risk management

Streamlining operational risk management

With the recent explosion of digital transformation, the operations of your enterprise are increasingly interconnected with the operations of third-party service providers. That makes managing operational risk more challenging, as a vendor’s unexpected downtime can have a serious negative impact on your bottom line.

To improve operational risk management, organizations must closely monitor their third-party vendors’ security posture. But because these suppliers are highly interconnected with vendors of their own, organizations need robust fourth-party risk management solutions to better understand and mitigate risk within the networks of their business partners.

To simplify operational risk management, Bitsight provides supply chain security that quickly expose third-party cyber risk as well as risky fourth-party connections. With Bitsight, security teams easily identify areas of concentrated cyber risk and ensure that all relationships within your supply chain fit into your business and information security strategy.

A two-fold approach to operational risk management

When it comes to third-party risk and cyber security, reducing operational risk requires action at two different levels:

Onboarding partners based on risk

Choosing vendors and partners that represent a lower risk to your organization is an essential part of operational risk management. To accomplish this, your risk managers need a way to easily summarize and communicate the risk associated with any business relationship. Third-party due diligence must involve collecting a broad range of information on any potential vendor such as:

• Basic company information that includes articles of incorporation, company structure overview, bios of executives and board members, proof of location, and references from credible sources.
• Financial information to determine whether vendors are financially solvent, paying taxes, and likely to be in business for the foreseeable future.
• Political and reputational risk, including any citations on key watch lists and global sanction lists, ties to corruption or politically exposed persons (PEP) lists, negative news reports, or litigation.
• Cyber risk, including the organization’s cybersecurity posture, history of data breaches, and security awareness testing performance.
• Operational risk, including plans for business continuity and disaster preparedness.

Managing risk in vendor and fourth-party relationships

Once vendors have been selected and onboarded, enterprises can improve operational risk management by constantly monitoring the security posture of third-party vendors and fourth-party relationships. Traditionally, companies have measured third-party risk through vendor self-assessments conducted at scheduled times. However, these don’t provide a complete picture of operational risk in vendor relationships. Self-assessments are inherently subjective and may or may not accurately reflect risk within a vendor’s relationship with a fourth-party contractor. Additionally, because these cyber risk assessments are typically conducted yearly or sporadically, they can’t provide the near-real-time snapshot of risk that risk managers need to effectively mitigate cyber liability and operational risk.

Managing operational risk with Bitsight

With the world’s most widely adopted Security Ratings solution, Bitsight provides tools that can help organizations dramatically improve operational risk management. The Bitsight platform offers several intuitive, powerful solutions that help risk managers take charge of cybersecurity issues and relationships with third-party vendors.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

Bitsight supports third-party risk management (TPRM) programs with tools to evaluate your vendors’ the security posture during the selection process as well as after they have been onboarded. Bitsight delivers insight into the riskiest issues impacting each vendor. With these details, third-party risk managers select vendors with greater confidence while accelerating the onboarding process. Once vendor relationships have been established, Bitsight enables risk managers to continuously monitor each vendor’s security posture daily, receiving alerts when incidents or behavior may suggest a change in a company’s security status.

Bitsight for Fourth-Party Risk Management

To uncover risk in vendors’ relationships with their own contractors, Bitsight automatically pinpoints connections between vendors and potentially risky service providers and subcontractors. This enables security teams to stay ahead of operational risk that may result from supply chain connections with weak security programs. This Bitsight solution empowers risk managers to plan for disaster recovery, assess downstream impacts, and streamline breach response.

How Bitsight Security Ratings work

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the data that drives third-party and fourth-party risk management. Much like credit ratings, Bitsight Security Ratings are developed solely through analysis of externally observable data – no information is required from the rated company. Bitsight continuously measures the security performance of thousands of organizations and issues a daily rating that ranges from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820. The higher the rating, the more effective the company is at implementing strong security practices.

Bitsight Security Ratings are calculated with a proprietary algorithm and are based on four categories of data: evidence of compromised systems, degree of security diligence, behavior of users, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Armed with daily ratings, risk managers proactively identify, quantify, and manage cybersecurity risk throughout their supply chain, helping to streamline and simplify operational risk management as well.

Bitsight provides centralized reporting capabilities to enable more effective communication about risk and security. Organizations leverage readily available cyber security risk assessment report samples and templates to simplify reporting, or create custom reports based on user-defined inputs that tailor reports to a specific risk tolerance and profile.

Bitsight provides the tools and capabilities to streamline operational risk management through deeper insight into third-party and fourth-party risk.

Comprehensive visibility into security performance

Bitsight Security Ratings deliver objective, verifiable, and actionable information based on industry-leading proprietary data sets and trusted, reputable data partnerships. With Bitsight ratings, enterprises mitigate operational risk by proactively managing risk with vendors.

Prioritized ratings

To enable risk managers to prioritize risk vectors and address the largest areas of risk, Bitsight considers only the most critical, high-quality risk vectors when assessing Security Ratings. Bitsight calculates importance in a more diversified way to ensure that the most critical assets are ranked higher.

A highly engaged community

With more than 2,100 Bitsight customers sharing ratings with more than 170,000 third-party organizations, the Bitsight Security Ratings platform is home to the most robust interactions between a large community of cyber risk professionals. Bitsight is the most widely used security ratings platform across all industries.