Third-Party Cyber Risk Assessment

What third-party cyber risk assessment means

Enterprises today are more extended than ever. Cloud-based technology, outsourcing and the rise of the remote workforce are creating greater challenges for organizations – especially when it comes to managing third-party cyber risk. And as data breaches in third-party vendors pose a significant threat to enterprise security, more organizations are seeking third-party cyber risk assessment solutions to manage risk more effectively.

As the world’s leading Security Rating Service, Bitsight offers third-party cyber risk assessment solutions that let you proactively mitigate third-party risk with automated tools to continually measure and monitor the security performance of your vendors. Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management immediately exposes cyber risk within your supply chain, providing the intelligence and insight required to achieve measurable risk reduction.

The role of security ratings in risk assessment

Security ratings are a critically important part of third-party cyber risk assessment. Using a standard set of information security KPIs, security ratings offer a data-driven, objective, and dynamic measure of a vendor’s security performance.

Security ratings provide several critical benefits.

1. Maximize value

With the tools to measure the effectiveness of a potential vendor’s security program over time, you can extract more value from your investment in third-party risk cyber security management efforts.

2. Accelerate selection

Using the finding from security ratings, you can establish clearly defined policies concerning thresholds for acceptable levels of risk to prescreen proposed vendors. By eliminating third parties that don’t meet your guidelines from the start, you can focus your resources and time on evaluating vendors with more acceptable cyber security posture.

3. Streamline evaluation

Rather than solely engaging in long, complete assessments of every vendor, you can use security ratings to allocate resources toward those that require greater due diligence. Insight gathered from security ratings may enable you to shorten onboarding questionnaires to focus primarily on areas of known risk. With the ability to see how a certain vendor compares against others in the same industry, you can make faster, more data-driven evaluations.

Third-Party Cyber Risk Assessment With Bitsight

Bitsight is the most widely adopted security ratings solution, helping to change the way the world addresses cyber risk. With Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, you can have the confidence to make faster, more strategic cyber risk management decisions. Bitsight’s third-party cyber risk assessment tools let you quickly launch, grow, or optimize your risk management programs with the resources you have today.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management relies on Bitsight Security Ratings, a data driven and dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Ratings are derived from objective, verifiable information with benchmarks in 20 major risk categories, including botnet infections, open ports, malware servers, spam propagation, patching cadence, and filesharing.

With Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, you can immediately identify cyber risk within your supply chain, allowing you to focus resources on achieving significant and measurable risk reduction. With data that correlates to potential security incidents, Bitsight provides insight into the most significant risks associated with your vendors.

Advantages of Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

Onboard vendors faster

Reduce the time and cost of onboarding vendors by identifying areas of known risk and quantifying cyber risk with risk factor breakdowns, smart tiering recommendations, and workflow integrations.

Enable vendor relationships more successfully

Bring on vendors – and benefit from the value they offer – in a timelier way while summarizing and communicating the risk associated with that relationship. Make outcomes-based, informed decisions by reviewing the technical details of potential security risks.

Reduce cyber risk

Prioritize resources to drive risk reduction across the organization and vendor relationships with a clear picture of cyber risk that’s aligned to your risk tolerance and a tiered approach to existing operational workflows.

Why choose 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 is Third-Party Cyber Risk Assessment