Continuous Monitoring For Third-Party Cyber Risk Management
Third-party cyber risk management has never been more important. From cloud-based offerings to outsourcing and managed services, enterprises rely on third-party vendors more than ever today. Yet incidents related to third-party data breaches are at an all-time high, with nearly 60% of organizations experiencing a data breach caused by a vendor or third-party relationship.1
In this environment, traditional approaches to third-party risk management are no longer sufficient. Yearly, manual assessments performed by vendors are helpful, but they’re only a snapshot and can’t provide an ongoing third-party cyber risk assessment. That’s why more risk managers today are seeking automated, continuous monitoring solutions to better track risk within vendor networks.
Continuous monitoring for third-party cyber risk management requires objective, verifiable data that details the security posture of each vendor and the risk they represent to the enterprise. That’s where Bitsight can help. With a security ratings solution that provides a clear view of every vendor’s security performance, Bitsight enables risk managers to proactively identify, quantify, and mitigate risk throughout their vendor ecosystem.
Why Continuous Monitoring Is Essential
Traditional third-party cyber risk management relies on periodic security reporting completed by vendors themselves. These self-assessments only capture a view of risk at a single point in time, and offer no guarantee of accuracy, honesty, or objectivity. Additionally, when working with hundreds or thousands of vendors, this manual approach to third-party cyber risk management is inevitably slow and costly.
Continuous monitoring, on the other hand, provides security managers with total visibility of the risk within the supply chain. Rather than reevaluating a vendor’s risk level quarterly or annually, continuous monitoring provides a real-time view of risk within the vendor ecosystem – including changes in a vendor’s security posture. As a result, security managers can take immediate action to remediate risk at any point in the vendor lifecycle, and don’t need to worry about missing a concerning vendor.
Automated, continuous monitoring is critical to third-party cyber risk management for several key reasons.
- Vendors have access to more data today. As enterprises and their third-party ecosystems become increasingly connected, vendors are more likely to have access to sensitive data – and at the same time, breaches caused by third parties are more likely to occur.
- Attacks play out faster than ever. Malicious actors can access data and wreak havoc more quickly than ever before. The scale and speed of threats requires third-party cyber risk management programs that can assess and respond to risk far more quickly than in the past.
- Risk managers must accomplish more in less time.. As the enterprise’s vendor ecosystem continues to expand, risk managers are under greater pressure to do more with less. Continuous monitoring lets risk managers abandon time-consuming, manual assessments and rely instead on automated evaluations that can efficiently and proactively mitigate risk.
1https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181115005665/en/Opus-Ponemon-Institute-Announce-Results-2018-Third-Party
Bitsight For Third-Party Risk Management
Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides continuous monitoring capabilities that allow organizations to make faster, more strategic decisions about third-party cyber risk management using the resources they have today. Bitsight immediately exposes cyber risk within the supply chain, helping risk managers to focus resources and work with vendors to achieve significant and measurable cyber risk reduction.
Bitsight helps security managers implement efficient processes for measuring risk throughout the vendor lifecycle. Rather than relying on yearly assessments or information reported by vendors themselves, Bitsight relies on Security Ratings to gain external insight into each vendor’s security posture and the riskiest issues they face.
Bitsight Security Ratings provide an accurate assessment of the security performance of an organization and its third-party vendors. Bitsight continuously measures security posture based on evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Through analysis of this externally observable data, Bitsight issues a daily security rating for each company that gives risk managers a complete and trusted view of their risk portfolio.
Advantages For Third-Party Cyber Risk Management
Bitsight’s solution for third-party cyber risk management is built on the only independently verified continuous monitoring database. Bitsight provides risk managers with:
- Security ratings that are proven to correlate with risk of data breaches. Research has proven that a company’s overall Bitsight rating, along with their grades in certain risk categories, can reliably predict future security performance if current security posture remains unchanged.
- A clear picture of cyber risk aligned to risk tolerance. With a clear view of critical performance information across the entire portfolio, Bitsight enables risk managers to make confident, data-driven decisions to prioritize resources that drive efficient risk reduction.
- Personalized monitoring options. Bitsight enables organizations to select the best level of monitoring for each vendor depending on their closeness to sensitive company data, as well as set alerts for when a vendor hits a concerning change in their rating, promoting greater efficiency without overspending or underutilizing risk management technology.
- Faster vendor on boarding. By providing immediate insight into a vendor’s security posture, Bitsight helps reduce the time and cost required for onboarding, and also serves as a first line of evaluation for if a vendor should be considered.
Why Trust Bitsight?
Founded in 2011, Bitsight has pioneered the security ratings market by employing an outside-in model similar to the credit ratings industry. Today, Bitsight is the leading security ratings service and is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to provide a clear picture of their security posture as well as risk in their third-party ecosystem. Bitsight security ratings enable organizations to benchmark their own security performance and serve as a complement to traditional solutions such as SIEM monitoring.
The Bitsight platform is used by 2,100+ customers worldwide to monitor 540,000 organizations. Bitsight is trusted by 20% of the world’s countries to protect national security, and 25% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Bitsight as well.