Security and Risk Management

Revolutionizing Third-Party Security and Risk Management

For professionals in security and risk management, third-party networks can be a challenge. Businesses want to quickly bring on vendors that can help to solve problems, reduce costs, and increase competitiveness. Yet each vendor represents a certain level of risk, especially as vendors increasingly have greater access to a company’s network and data.

To better manage third-party networks, security and risk management professionals are turning to continuous monitoring technology. Cybersecurity professionals have long used continuous monitoring to stay on top of cyber threats and to measure the effectiveness of an organization’s defenses. Today, security leaders charged with managing third-party risk are using continuous monitoring to gain greater visibility into the security posture of their vendors.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management is a security ratings solution that includes continuous monitoring capabilities that can more easily identify risk in third-party networks. With Bitsight, risk managers get complete visibility into their risk portfolio, enabling organizations to achieve significant and measurable third-party risk reduction.

Three Benefits for Security and Risk Management Leaders

Continuous monitoring provides security and risk management professionals with a solution that can keep pace with the rapid growth of cyber threats. Traditional methods of third-party cyber risk management rely on yearly assessments conducted through questionnaires that are completed by the vendors themselves. This point-in-time assessment provides only a once-per-year snapshot of the vendor’s security posture. It also lacks objectivity, as the assessments are often based on a vendor’s own assertions about their security efforts.

Continuous monitoring transforms third-party security and risk management by constantly evaluating vendor security performance and alerting the organization when a vulnerability is detected. Risk managers can take immediate action to work with vendors to mitigate the risk, enhancing security for both the vendor and the organization.

With continuous monitoring technology, security and risk management leaders can:

• Gain visibility into each vendor’s risk landscape. Rather than focusing solely on the obvious points of risk in a third-party risk management program, security professionals can monitor risk throughout a vendor’s profile. Vulnerabilities like shadow IT, cloud data, on-premise cyber data, SIEMs, and firewalls can become part of the vendor’s security evaluation.
• Use automated, data-driven processes throughout the vendor lifecycle. By combining continuous monitoring with other streamlined vendor management processes, third-party risk programs can run far more efficiently.
• Provide the board and executives with reliable, timely metrics. With continuous monitoring, risk management can provide company leadership with up-to-date cybersecurity data on third-party risk and security performance. Security leaders can use a wide range of data and metrics to justify security budgets, report on the effectiveness of cybersecurity controls, and facilitate data-driven conversations about cybersecurity protection.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

The continuous monitoring technology in Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management lets risk managers enjoy a complete view of their risk portfolio. Bitsight provides daily Security Ratings that give risk managers unprecedented insight into the security posture of each vendor. With a clear understanding of which third parties represent the greatest risk, third-party risk management teams can work with vendors to address their security and risk management issues and reduce risk across the portfolio.

Developed with an outside-in approach, Bitsight Security Ratings are based on externally verifiable data that can reveal with great accuracy certain risks within a vendor’s IT environment. Bitsight ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the rating, the more effective the company is at managing risk with good security practices. Ratings are derived with a proprietary algorithm and analysis of four classes of data – compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches.

With Bitsight Security Ratings, security and risk management teams can scale monitoring of third, fourth, and nth parties to ensure acceptable levels of risk and that vendors are complying with cyber security regulations.

Bitsight Security Ratings Correlate to Breaches

In a study of 27,000+ companies over a two-year period, Bitsight demonstrated that its security ratings can indicate the risk of a publicly disclosed breach. Specifically, companies with a rating of 500 or lower were 5X more likely to experience a publicly disclosed data breach than organizations with ratings of 700 or more.

Armed with this knowledge, Bitsight customers can:

• Enhance third-party risk management with continuous monitoring.
• Prioritize which vendors need follow-up or on-site assessment.
• Work collaboratively with vendors to address low security scores.
• Empower vendors to work to lower their risk of a breach.
• Benchmark the organization’s security performance.
• Provide upper-level management with metrics that have real meaning and context.
• Remediate issues to lower the risk of a breach.

Why 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 the essentials of security and risk management?