Third-party cyber risk

The key to mitigating third-party cyber risk

3 out of 5 data breaches originate with a vendor. As companies increasingly rely on outsourcing and cloud-based technology, third-party cyber risk is a growing concern for risk managers today. As supply chains grow and become more interconnected, that number is expected to rise.

Traditionally, security teams perform yearly, manual self-assessments to manage third-party cyber risk. However, this approach is no longer flexible or scalable enough to manage rapidly growing vendor networks. And these periodic assessments can’t provide data that risk managers need most – real-time insight into cyber liability and risk.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management gives security teams what they need most to mitigate third-party cyber risk, including automated tools and continuous monitoring capabilities.

How continuous monitoring helps reduce risk

Internal continuous monitoring has been an invaluable tool for security operations centers as they combat attacks and manage vulnerabilities. By helping to quickly identify threats, continuous monitoring tools enable security teams to take swift action within their organization.

However, adoption of continuous monitoring for third-party risk management has been slower. In part, this is because organizations have lacked the visibility into vendors’ security measures and controls. To manage third-party risk and supply chain security, risk managers have had to rely on security assessments performed by vendors themselves, often conducted only once each year.

While self-assessments provide some help, they are conducted so infrequently that they can’t provide continuous or real-time insight into a vendor’s security posture or adherence to cyber risk best practices. Additionally, self-assessments are inevitably subjective and must be verified with objective context – a costly and time-consuming prospect.

A program for continuous monitoring can deliver clear insight into third-party risk and cyber security issues. To implement continuous monitoring, risk managers need daily updates that deliver objective, verifiable information about a vendor’s security posture. That’s where Bitsight Security Ratings can help.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management offers real-time insight into the riskiest issues impacting your vendor network. By allowing risk managers to continuously monitor and measure the security performance of vendors, Bitsight simplifies cyber risk assessment and dramatically reduces third-party cyber risk.

Bitsight Security Ratings are the key to operational risk management with the Bitsight platform. Bitsight’s daily ratings are based on objective and externally verifiable data that illuminates the security posture of an organization and its third-party vendors. Evaluating risk vectors like the number of botnet infections, publicly disclosed breaches, file sharing behavior, out-of-date devices, and TLS/SSL certificates, Bitsight develops a Security Rating for each vendor that gauges their security posture and alerts risk managers when there are changes in behavior or status that may increase risk.

With continuous monitoring through Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, organizations can more easily manage third-party cyber risk in a growing vendor network, making confident, data-driven decisions to prioritize resources while driving risk reduction across the vendor portfolio.

How Bitsight revolutionizes third-party cyber risk

Continuous monitoring of third-party cyber risk delivers invaluable data insights into your vendors’ activity and security posture. With Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, risk managers can lower the time and cost of risk management activities while scaling easily to manage assessments for a growing pool of vendors.

Bitsight empowers security and risk teams to take decisive action to manage cyber risk. We enable you to:

• Be proactive about risk. Rather than waiting to gauge risk until it’s time for a scheduled assessment, risk managers can continuously monitor the actions of vendors and trigger an assessment immediately when there are changes to security posture or Bitsight security ratings.
• Tailor assessments for each vendor. Because each vendor represents a different level of third-party cyber risk, using identical assessments for all vendors can increase costs and place more strain on risk management teams, especially when working with hundreds or thousands of vendors. With Bitsight, risk managers can tailor assessments to each vendor and address specific areas of concern based on changes in security ratings or risk vectors.
• Create tiers of vendor assessment. Risk managers can establish tiers of vendors, assessing critical vendors more often than non-critical companies. Continuous monitoring with Bitsight helps set reassessment policies and identify the tier to which each vendor belongs.
• Gain greater context for self-assessments. Vendor self-assessments are an important part of third-party cyber risk management, but they don’t show the full picture. With Bitsight, risk managers can continuously monitor security posture of vendors to validate their assessments with objective information and flag areas for follow-up.

Why trust Bitsight?

Broad visibility

Bitsight delivers comprehensive visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, IoT systems, mobile apps, and more.

Superior analytics

Bitsight delivers a suite of analytics capabilities to manage challenges such as peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only ratings solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight enables significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes to drive proven ROI.

Adopted widely

Bitsight is the choice of companies, banks, governments, regulators, and insurers worldwide.