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 – 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 Makes BitSight #1 in Security and Risk Management?

BitSight has pioneered the security ratings market, transforming how organizations evaluate risk and security performance. By employing the outside-in model used by credit rating agencies, BitSight delivers actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks through continuous monitoring of large pools of objective and independently verified data.

BitSight is the choice of many of the world’s leading companies and governments, including 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 20% of the world’s companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, all of the Big 4 accounting firms, and 25% of Fortune 500 companies.

FAQs: What are the essentials of security and risk management?