Security Risk Management

The key to improving security risk management

CISOs and risk leaders today are faced with incredible challenges—but extraordinary opportunities as well. Digital transformation, supply chain risk, and expanded attack surfaces have made the task of security risk management more complex. At the same time, boards of directors and C-suite leadership are finally realizing that cyber risk is business risk, opening the door for CISOs and risk leaders to play a greater part in successfully guiding their organizations through these uncertain times.

In this expanded role, choosing the right security risk management solutions is essential. CISOs need powerful tools for quantifying cyber risk and aligning stakeholders on how to manage it. The right solution will help CISOs assess performance, qualify vendors, benchmark progress, prioritize investments, and minimize financial loss.

As a leader in cybersecurity risk and exposure management, Bitsight offers a security risk management solution with integrated applications to manage risk and build trust across the entire ecosystem. Our solution gives cyber leaders the tools to manage and monitor cyber risk, achieve alignment with the board, and drive critical workflows across risk, performance, and exposure so their companies can grow their ecosystems without worrying about expanded risk.

Governance principles for security risk management

As CISOs and risk leaders confront growing cyber risk uncertainty, these five principles can help refine strategic direction and empower them to steward their companies, protect against risk, enable growth, and lead across the business.

• Measure against an objective standard. As CISOs monitor risk and strategize solutions, they must gauge risk against independent, externally validated standards trusted by all parties. These objective standards make it possible to establish baselines, benchmark performance, and compare the organization’s security posture against peers.
• Validate continuously with a widening aperture. Managing risk today requires tools that can continuously monitor risk and security posture for the organization as well as third-party and fourth-party networks. The ability to see exposure across the entire ecosystem is a critical tool in keeping a constant check on emerging threats and knowing when the landscape has shifted.
• Quantify risk with greater confidence. To answer the hard questions that boards are asking around risk and exposure, CISOs must be able to quantify risk and correlate it to business outcomes, calculating the likely financial and material impact of incidents.
• Prioritize investment for higher impact and returns. Investments in risk and security solutions must be based on clear-eyed insight into areas of disproportionate risk and financial quantification of cyber risk in business terms. With this data, CISOs can extend their budgets by making measured trade-offs, aligning capital allocation needs against risks, and justifying investments to the board.
• Communicate and build trust. To align all stakeholders around a common understanding of cyber risk and how to address it, risk leaders must continuously build trust by communicating in a standard common language that stakeholders with both technical and non-technical backgrounds can understand and agree on. These efforts include reporting key risk indicators and auditing performance over time to show how security investments are helping the organization grow stronger every day.

Security risk management with Bitsight

Enterprises of all sizes and industries rely on Bitsight to accelerate digital transformation and expand distributed ecosystems without expanding their attack surfaces or accelerating financial woes. While we invented the security ratings industry, our solutions today go beyond cyber risk ratings to provide actionable financial and business insights that help CISOs lead more effectively by speaking the language of their business leaders and boards.

One of our core solutions, Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM), features capabilities designed to improve every aspect of security risk management. SPM combines market-leading cyber risk data, validated metrics that correlate to business outcomes, and actionable risk insights that assess performance and prioritize activities. As a leading cyber risk management solution, Bitsight SPM provides tools for:

• Visualizing the attack surface. External attack surface management tools provide full visibility into the attack surface, enabling risk leaders to understand where exposure exists now and how to monitor it in the future.
• Prioritizing resources. Bitsight provides objective, independent, and broadly adopted key performance indicators (KPIs) that assess external security postures continuously and efficiently. SPM reveals gaps such as misconfiguration, vulnerabilities, and unpatched systems, ranking areas of critical or disproportionate risk across the digital ecosystem to focus security investments on areas of greatest need.
• Adding financial context to risk. Bitsight’s tools for cyber risk quantification calculate cyber risk in financial terms. With Bitsight, CISOs and risk leaders make more informed decisions about managing risk, setting priorities, calculating cyber insurance based on unique risk appetites, and proving ROI over time to stakeholders.
• Scaling with ease. SPM automates the process of identifying gaps in security controls, measuring the effectiveness of security programs, and identifying where improvements are needed. With cyber exposure management solutions that are applicable to businesses of any size, Bitsight enables risk and security teams to effectively scale security risk management programs as the business grows and evolves.

Managing risk in vendor ecosystems

To improve security risk management for vendor ecosystems, Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) provides tools to accelerate vendor risk assessments, continuously monitor the extended digital ecosystem, and take action swiftly and confidently. Market-leading cyber risk data enables risk teams to prioritize, mitigate, and report on risk across the vendor portfolio. Actionable risk insights empower teams to make better decisions to improve efficiency and security effectiveness.

With Bitsight TPRM, organizations can:

• Scale security risk management programs to enable business growth. TPRM ensures third parties are within the organization’s risk tolerance, accelerates onboarding with automated assessments, and validates vendor responses with objective data and evidence.
• Continuously monitor vendor security controls. Bitsight’s vendor risk monitoring capabilities deliver a full view of the security posture of third and fourth parties to detect and address ongoing risk, remediate issues easily with supporting data, and automatically discover fourth-party product usage.
• Detect and respond to third-party vulnerabilities. TPRM provides the tools to handle major security events across third and fourth parties. With Bitsight, teams can help Companies mitigate emerging zero-day vulnerabilities at scale, improve the efficiency of vendor outreach, and use real-time reporting to focus on what matters most.

Why trust 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.