Security Benchmarks

Optimizing Security With Benchmarking

While benchmarking has helped improve performance in many areas of business, most cybersecurity teams have been unable to take advantage of this powerful tool. The reason: security benchmarks require more than the traditional metrics with point-in-time assessments, subjective judgments, or highly technical KPIs. To reap the value of security benchmarking, security teams need tools that provide continuous, objective, easily understood metrics that offer an externally comparative view of cybersecurity performance over time.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking offer a continuous, data-driven measure of security performance, allowing businesses to establish a quantified baseline and comparative data. With Bitsight, organizations can benchmark their security performance on a wide set of actionable metrics.

The Value Of Security Benchmarks

Security ratings provide a baseline that organizations can use to measure their cybersecurity performance across business units and against competitors and peers. By tracking ratings over time and comparing them to the ratings of other companies, security leaders and risk managers can establish security benchmarks that reveal where their organization or department stands.

With security benchmarks, organizations can:

• Improve cybersecurity planning. Benchmarking helps teams set concrete performance goals and eliminate vague objectives about “increasing security” or “enhancing security architecture.” With measurable, verifiable metrics, security teams can take clear action and justify requests for resources.
• Monitor progress. Security benchmarks make it clear where companies need to improve security practices and let teams track changes over time. Benchmarking facilitates cyber risk analytics and the tasks of remediating the most critical security issues and refocusing overall IT strategy.
• Improve reporting. Armed with actionable security benchmarks, IT leaders can more effectively communicate with executives and the board. With simplified metrics like security ratings, IT leaders and executives can have more productive conversations about cyber risk management and what resources are required to improve it. Cyber security reports that compare performance to competitors and peers can help decision-makers understand the need for investment in key areas of security.
• Justify budgets. Security benchmarks help IT leaders present information to demonstrate the ROI of cybersecurity investments and how security programs can support business goals.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight Security Ratings offer a data-driven measure of the security performance of an organization and its vendors. Bitsight’s ratings are derived from objective, externally observable and verifiable information and provide a score – from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – that indicates how effective a company is at implementing good security controls.

Bitsight continually analyzes, evaluates, and monitors the security posture of thousands of companies using externally observable data. Ratings are updated daily, and Bitsight issues alerts when a company’s rating changes significantly.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking give security leaders visibility into a wealth of risk vector data on their own company as well as their vendors and peers. With security benchmarks from Bitsight, organizations can measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to peers, and communicate KPIs to the board.

The Benefits of Bitsight’s Security Benchmarking Technology

Security and risk leaders can use Bitsight’s security benchmarking technology to achieve measurable improvement in security programs. Bitsight enables security teams to:

• Identify issues. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform delivers actionable metrics on compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed breaches for companies and their peers. With this data, security leaders can better understand diligence standards across the industry and gain insight into industry-specific threats.
• Communicate performance. Bitsight simplifies communication with C-suite leaders and the board. Security and risk managers can share KPIs with historical and industry context to help demonstrate program improvements and advocate for increased resources.
• Compare to peers. With Bitsight you can compare your score and performance to peers and competitors in the same industry or of similar company size to understand how you’re performing relative to averages.
• Strengthen reputation. Superior risk management can be a business advantage and differentiator. Organizations with successful security programs can use benchmarking to demonstrate achievements and progress.
• Run detailed forensics. With Bitsight’s actionable forensics package, security leaders can identify infections on the company’s network and provide detailed specifics (including destination URLs, destination IPs, location, timestamp, and more) that allow security teams to successfully remediate potentially harmful threats.

Why set security benchmarks with 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 security benchmarks?