Only Bitsight integrates security ratings with your other tools to enrich data and enhance decision making

Security ratings have emerged as one of the most important tools for organizations to improve their program’s performance. Security ratings provide both program assurance and improve program performance by measuring the externally visible effects of your program's execution.

A security ratings solutions service lets an organization review and compare performance for themselves and their third party vendors, business associates, and supply chain partners as objectively as possible from a cybersecurity perspective. Using a common framework to explore security performance, a company can make an informed decision on what level of risk they are willing to assume or mitigate.

Many organizations today use point-in-time assessments and questionnaires to ascertain the security posture of their suppliers and vendors. The issue with this is that many organizations now use an automated answering process to provide “canned” answers for these assessments. When you send an assessment request to a company, your assessment response may be multiple years old. You need a way to objectively verify the answers you get and flag discrepancies.

Similarly, many organizations use a patchwork of tools and KPIs to try and determine the efficacy of their own security controls. Often organizations use overly technical or meaningless KPIs to communicate to business leaders how the security program is performing. A good security ratings solutions solution should use a range of externally observable risk events to determine the effectiveness of the security program over time, and translate that data into easily understandable numbers.

A security ratings solution that has been independently verified to correlate to risk can help facilitate discussions about business impact, prioritization, investment, and roadmap.

Choosing a Ratings Partner

But not all security ratings are created equal. From the reliability of their data, to the transparency of the ratings process, to the dispute resolution process, you need to be selective about who you choose as your ratings partner.

So what should you look for when choosing a cyber security ratings partner?

Capabilities

• Data Collection
  • The ability to continuously, non-intrusively collect data for security controls as well as event data
• Asset Mapping
  • The ability to map a company accurately and identify the attack surface of an organization
• Rating Calculation Methodology
  • An easy to understand weighting of risk based on detections and classification of behaviors
• Integration and API
  • The solution should include the ability to tightly integrate with other tools in your environment
• Discovery of service providers and products
  • A security risk solution should have the ability to discover technology providers and products in an organization’s infrastructure

Want to learn more about what you should look for in a security ratings solution?

Check out our Cybersecurity Risk Rating Solutions Buyers Guide and Recommendations for an in-depth guide to choosing the right security ratings partner for your organization.