What is continuous controls monitoring?

Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) is the ongoing, automated process of collecting and analyzing data about an organization’s security and compliance controls to verify that they are operating effectively and as intended, in near real time. By instrumenting key processes—such as access provisioning, configuration management, change management and security policy enforcement—CCM turns periodic, snapshot-based testing into a dynamic, continuous assessment, enabling rapid detection of control failures or deviations and driving faster remediation.

At its core, CCM leverages automated tools and data feeds—such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), identity management systems, configuration management databases and cloud-native APIs—to continuously validate that controls (both technical and procedural) meet defined policies and risk thresholds.

Rather than waiting for quarterly or annual audits, CCM provides security and risk teams with up-to-date evidence of control effectiveness, alerting on exceptions such as unauthorized configuration changes, access policy violations or failed patch deployments. This real-time insight reduces blind spots across the extended attack surface, aligns operations with compliance mandates and drives a measurable uptick in security posture. 

Benefits of continuous controls monitoring

Continuous controls monitoring delivers several key advantages for security and risk professionals:

• Proactive risk management: CCM transforms controls from static checkboxes into dynamic sensors. Teams can detect and remediate control gaps—such as misconfigurations or policy violations—as they occur, rather than months later.
• Reduced audit effort: By automating evidence collection and generating dashboards of control performance, CCM minimizes manual testing and documentation, lowering audit costs and freeing up scarce security resources.
• Improved compliance posture: Continuous validation of regulatory and internal policy requirements (e.g., PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2) ensures controls remain aligned with changing standards, helping organizations stay inspection-ready.
• Enhanced visibility and reporting: Real-time control metrics and exception analytics give CISOs, GRC leaders and auditors a single pane of glass to understand control health, trends over time and remediation progress.
• Faster remediation cycles: Automated alerts and workflow integrations ensure that control failures feed directly into ticketing or orchestration platforms, accelerating fix-times and shrinking mean time to repair (MTTR).

Continuous controls monitoring framework

A robust CCM program typically comprises five integrated phases:

Define control objectives

Translate risk appetite and compliance requirements into specific, measurable control objectives (for example, “all internet-facing servers must have critical patches deployed within seven days”).

Map and instrument controls

Identify data sources—like vulnerability scanners, endpoint management systems or identity directories—and deploy agents or API connectors to collect relevant telemetry continuously.

Monitor and detect

Use analytics and rule engines to process incoming data streams, flagging exceptions when controls fall out of compliance (e.g., unexpected privilege escalations or unauthorized network changes).

Report and visualize

Surface control health metrics and exception trends through dashboards and executive reports, providing stakeholders with contextualized insights aligned to business units, geographies or risk domains.

Remediate and optimize

Integrate CCM alerts with SOAR or IT service management platforms to automate ticket creation, assign remediation tasks and track closure metrics. Feed post-incident reviews back into control design to continuously refine policies and thresholds.

The importance of continuous controls monitoring

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) suggests that implementing recommended critical security controls help you to prevent the majority of cyberattacks your organization will face each year. But along with putting controls in place, you must also continually look for gaps in security programs and controls—and take steps to remediate them.

This type of continuous controls monitoring involves three essential technologies:

1. Inventorying controls. Determine which controls are currently in place as part of your security performance management program.
2. Identifying your attack surface. Assemble a comprehensive view of the attack surface that your controls are meant to protect. This comprises your entire digital footprint including subsidiaries, geographies, assets, IPs, and domains.
3. Assessing effectiveness of controls. Continually assess how effective your controls are so you can identify gaps for remediation.

Improving security with CCM

No matter how strong your security programs are, you’re bound to have vulnerabilities in your security controls. Gaps like misconfigured software, unpatched systems, and open ports can all expose your organization to cyber risk. Even when you remediate these gaps, new issues will inevitably arise over time. Traditional security solutions help resolve these issues, but they’re merely addressing symptoms on a case-by-case basis rather than identifying root causes.

Constantly assessing the effectiveness of your security controls requires significant and costly manual effort, expertise, and analysis. That’s why Bitsight for Security Performance Management has introduced Control Insights, a continuous controls monitoring solution to help you move away from tactical methods of fixing vulnerabilities to a strategic focus on the true variables that impact cyber risk.

Bitsight Control Insights

Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) provides tools for tracking and improving security program performance over time. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight SPM facilitates cyber risk oversight and streamlines program management decisions.

Control Insights, a feature of Bitsight SPM, provides an automated approach to continuous controls monitoring. Control Insights uses a best practice framework to measure how effective your security controls are and to suggest the best ways to remediate any gaps. Leveraging over 540 billion externally observable events each day that are gathered from more than 120 different sources, Control Insights offers an objective, evidence-based, continuous controls monitoring capability to measure the effectiveness of your controls consistently and reliably.

Unlike point solutions that only measure the effectiveness of a single control, Control Insights assesses effectiveness across your extended organization without requiring any initial configuration. Control Insights measures security program progress over the past six months to streamline efforts to develop performant security controls. Insights available through this Bitsight technology include:

• A prescriptive analysis of each control’s effectiveness.
• An explanation as to why a Control Insight was triggered.
• Details about the evidence surrounding each security control.

Continuous controls monitoring with Bitsight

When relying on Bitsight Control Insights, your security teams count on several essential benefits.

Root cause analysis of security vulnerabilities

Rather than simply resolving issues, Bitsight Control Insights identifies the true variables that impact cyber risk, providing your team with a more meaningful way to improve overall security performance.

No more “whack-a-mole” with security findings

By addressing the root causes of security gaps, you can avoid the “whack-a-mole” syndrome where a gap is fixed one week only to see a similar issue pop up the next. For example, rather than simply identifying and removing expired certificates from digital assets Control Insights empowers security teams to implement a control to prevent expired certificates in the first place.

A proactive approach to addressing gaps

Control Insights continuously assesses the effectiveness of security controls across your extended organization, without requiring any initial configuration. It enables the kind of continuous controls monitoring that enables you to proactively secure your organization against an evolving threat landscape.

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.

The need for cloud security posture management

Cloud services provide businesses with extraordinary value. Delivering the ability to simplify storage, analyze data faster, and streamline team communication, cloud providers help businesses operate more efficiently and maintain competitive positioning every day.

To take advantage of cloud services, however, organizations must often integrate cloud providers with their network and entrust them with sensitive data. Many security managers make the mistake of believing that large and well-known cloud service organizations are virtually immune from data breaches. In reality, these providers are as vulnerable to cyberattacks as any organization. That makes managing cloud security posture as critical as managing security programs for on-premises or internal infrastructure.

Bitsight offers a suite of solutions based on its industry-leading Security Ratings that can deliver comprehensive cybersecurity visibility into cloud infrastructure. With help from Bitsight, your security team can quickly identify and remediate security performance gaps in cloud deployments and streamline cloud security posture management.

The components of cloud security posture management

Superior cloud security posture management requires advanced tools that can accomplish three critical objectives:

Enable clear visibility into cloud infrastructure

Visibility is the starting point for superior cloud security posture management. By gaining a complete, external picture of where the risk exists in your network, you can take steps to remediate vulnerabilities quickly, while potentially identifying larger areas of concentrated risk.

Provide external verification of your attack surface

An external view of your attack surface can validate the analysis and research performed internally. Solutions that offer a cyber risk rating can help security managers trust that they have a complete view and accurate understanding of their network as they make decisions about cloud security.

Streamline reporting and benchmarking

Advanced reporting technology is essential for managing cloud security posture. With reports that summarize program improvements, you can successfully engage company decision-makers in productive cybersecurity conversations. Effective benchmarking is also important to provide context as you work to demonstrate security performance that meets or exceeds those of peers, partners, and competitors.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

Bitsight offers the most widely adopted Security Ratings solution in the world, changing the way that companies address cyber risk. Bitsight’s Security Ratings offer a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’ s cybersecurity performance. Ratings help organizations monitor and improve cyber hygiene, and offer the external verification security teams need to improve cloud security posture management.

Bitsight Security Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with larger numbers equating to stronger security posture. Ratings are issued daily and are based on objective, externally verifiable data collected from 120+ sources. This information reveals an organization’s security performance on 23 key risk vectors in four major categories: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Calculated with a proprietary algorithm, Bitsight ratings have been proven to correlate to breach – the lower the security rating, the more likely the rated entity will succumb to a data breach.

In addition to an overall view of security posture, Bitsight Security Ratings illuminate security performance on specific risk vectors and can identify vulnerabilities in on-premises and cloud infrastructure. With Bitsight, security teams get a daily verification of their security posture in the cloud.

Bitsight solutions for cloud security posture management

In addition to Security Ratings, the Bitsight platform offers several solutions that can improve cloud security posture management.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight provides continuous visibility into digital ecosystems and increasingly complex attack surfaces. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics uncovers risk hidden across digital assets in the cloud, different geographies and subsidiaries, and remote workforces. A centralized dashboard shows the location of all digital assets broken down by cloud provider and business unit, along with the corresponding cyber risk associated with each asset. Bitsight also uncovers instances of shadow IT and assesses them for risk so they can be brought into line with corporate security policies.

Executive Reporting with Bitsight

Bitsight Executive Reports drive more informative and productive conversations about cyber risk with company decision-makers. By making security performance more accessible and easier to understand, Bitsight helps security teams communicate risk, identify gaps, and justify investments on security programs. Security teams can leverage more than a dozen readily available reports with cyber security policy examples, or create custom reports on the fly.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

In addition to security performance within an organization, Bitsight can expose risk within cloud services and third and fourth-party vendors. Bitsight enables security teams to perform cybersecurity risk assessments on vendors, potential vendors, and the cloud services they rely on.

Choosing a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Vendor

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, maintaining a strong security posture is crucial for organizations. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors play a vital role in helping organizations continuously monitor, assess, and remediate security risks and misconfigurations in their cloud environments.

Mitigate risk with a cloud security audit

As organizations increasingly turn to cloud services, the number of annual cloud security breaches have outpaced attacks towards on-premises infrastructure. To combat these threats, security teams must perform regular cloud security audits to better understand the attack surface, identify controls to protect it, and monitor security performance. Visibility is key – risk teams need timely, objective cyber security information that can reveal the cloud security posture of their organization and of the many third-party and forth-party vendors in their supply chain.

Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight offers solutions for monitoring the attack surface, identifying gaps in security controls, and preparing cyber security presentations for leadership that can deliver a more aligned approach to cloud security across the organization.

Elements of a cloud security audit

While audits should be customized to the size of the organization and the challenges of specific industries, there are certain best practices that tend to be common to all cloud security audits.

Evaluating security posture of providers

Just as organizations monitor the security posture of vendors before onboarding, a cloud security audit should independently evaluate and summarize risk based on data-driven insights into the security posture of cloud service providers. Automated tools can help to streamline this process and minimize the burden on risk management teams who traditionally perform assessments manually.

Visualizing the attack surface

A cloud security audit should spotlight vulnerabilities and risk across the attack surface, including cloud services and infrastructure. By continuously monitoring and analyzing a cloud environment, security teams can identify gaps in security controls and pinpoint specific and actionable risk points across cloud assets. This information can help to focus efforts on remediating areas of concentrated risk, and helps prioritize risk reduction towards the most pressing vulnerability instead of treating every risk the same. Cloud security monitoring can also resolve the challenge of the shared responsibility model of cloud services, delivering visibility into the risk profile of the cloud assets.

Establishing controls

Violations of access management are some of the most common cloud security risks. A cloud security audit can reveal issues with password policies, permissions, multi-vector authentication, and user interaction with cloud assets.

Setting sharing standards

Unauthorized use of file sharing services represents a significant risk to security. A cloud security audit should highlight potential threats in filesharing activities and review data loss prevention policies.

Monitor patching cadence

Sticking to a regular patching cadence is essential for cloud security. A cloud security audit can help to quickly identify unpatched systems and prioritize efforts and resources to ensure that the most critical systems are prioritized for patching.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform 

Bitsight Security Ratings provide the visibility and metrics security teams need to perform an efficient and effective cloud security audits.

Founded in 2011, Bitsight is dedicated to transforming how organizations evaluate risk and security performance. Bitsight pioneered the outside-in approach to security ratings, the same approach used by credit rating agencies. Today, Bitsight is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations to deliver a clear picture of their security posture and to spotlight risk in their supply chain.

The Bitsight platform offers a suite of solutions for measuring the security performance of organizations and their vendors. Each of these solutions is built on Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings, which offer a comprehensive picture of a company’s overall cybersecurity posture. Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with higher ratings indicating better overall security performance.

Bitsight’s Security Ratings don’t rely on traditional techniques like questionnaires, on-site visits, and penetration testing. Rather, ratings are based on objective and externally verifiable data drawn from 120+ sources. Ratings are based on metrics in four areas of cybersecurity: evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Ratings are calculated using a proprietary algorithm that prioritizes higher-value risk vectors for the most accurate measurement of security performance.

Benefits for cloud security posture

With the Bitsight Security Ratings platform, security teams can take advantage of several solutions when performing a cloud security audit.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight provides a centralized dashboard that inventories all digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, third party, and business unit. Bitsight also lists the corresponding cyber risk associated with each asset. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics helps to discover hidden assets and cloud instances, assessing them for risk and helping to bring them in line with corporate security policies and industry regulations or standards.

Bitsight For Security Performance Management

Bitsight delivers an unbiased, objective view of the security posture of your cloud infrastructure and systems as well as those of your cloud service providers. This external view on your attack surface can validate or inform the analysis your teams have developed internally.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

In addition to measuring an organization’s security performance, Bitsight provides immediate insight into cyber risk within the supply chain, including cloud service providers.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight’s security benchmarking capabilities help security teams to measure cloud security performance against industry peers. With proper benchmarking data, security managers can provide context around what their cybersecurity data really mean, and facilitate communication with company decision makers.

Bitsight Executive Reports

Bitsight’s reporting capabilities facilitate data-driven conversations that help security and risk leaders communicate effectively with company leadership. Tools for centralized reporting enable teams to quickly prepare information security presentations and easily update cybersecurity KPI dashboards. Security teams can leverage cybersecurity executive summary examples and templates or create custom reports on the fly.

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. 

What is an Attack Surface?

An organization’s attack surface is the sum of all the devices, access points, and IT assets that attackers may target within an IT environment as they attempt to gain access. Attack surfaces include endpoint devices and users as well as vulnerabilities within software and connected hardware.

As the digital perimeter of businesses continues to grow, there’s a great deal of talk about the expanding attack surface and how to protect it. There’s also a growing list of companies who, having failed to protect their massive attack surfaces, suffered breaches that exposed sensitive customer information and corporate data.

What is Attack Surface Monitoring?

Attack surface monitoring is the practice of continually gauging the size and composition of a company’s attack surface and evaluating the risks within it, such as ransomware and social engineering attacks.

How Can you Protect Your Attack Surface?

Protecting an attack surface has become more difficult as companies expand their digital footprint. From the adoption of cloud services to the use of remote/home networks and personal devices, a growing number of technology trends are contributing to the exponential growth of organizations’ attack surfaces.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics offers an effective way to gain visibility into your attack surface and the risks from cyber security threats and vulnerabilities within your digital ecosystem. With Bitsight, you get the attack surface monitoring solution you need to build better cyber security and risk management programs.

Best Practices for Defending Your Attack Surface

There are several critical best practices when it comes to protecting an attack surface:

Monitoring your endpoints

Continuous monitoring is essential to securing your endpoints. You’ll want to monitor endpoints and devices like laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and tablets as well as digital environments like services and cloud services. New servers and network connections from vendors and employees working from home must also be carefully observed. You’ll also want to use a cyber security assessment tool to see how your internal security controls are performing and to determine which endpoints pose the greatest risk in your attack surface.

Visualizing vulnerabilities

You can’t protect what you can’t see. To understand what your attack surface looks like and where risk is concentrated, you need broad visibility into your entire digital footprint across geographies, business units, cloud service providers, subsidiaries, third parties, and home offices. 

To reduce the opportunities for attack, you can perform a cyber security vulnerability assessment to discover vulnerabilities through simulation forecasting. By running scenarios that mimic the work of a malicious attacker, you can gain a clear picture of where your vulnerable spots are, what damage they might allow, and how you can remediate them.

Reducing human error

Your users are the weakest link in your security chain, and it’s hard to protect against human error. No matter how many controls or programs you put in place to protect your attack surface, users can often inadvertently and unknowingly find a way to subvert them. Protecting your attack surface from human error requires superior awareness training. You can also limit the devices employees are allowed to use for work and require security measures such as two-factor authentication and frequent password changes.

Benchmark performance

Evaluating security performance and cyber risk exposure against industry peers can help to uncover gaps in your cybersecurity program. With superior benchmarking, you can create data-driven remediation plans to confidently meet security performance goals.

Set risk thresholds

While it’s impossible to completely eliminate risk, your teams must be clear on what represents an acceptable level of risk for your organization. By setting risk thresholds, you can continuously monitor the performance of your organization and third-party vendors in a manageable way, and take steps to remediate issues when thresholds are crossed.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Founded in 2011, Bitsight has become the world’s leading Security Ratings Service, helping to transform how companies address management of third-party risk and their own security performance. Bitsight’s platform delivers actionable security ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks through continuous monitoring of large collections of objective and independently verify data.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics provides the tools to continuously discover and segment the assets, applications, and devices that make up your attack surface. With Bitsight, you can see your attack surface clearly, assess your current risk exposure, prioritize high-risk assets, and take actions to mitigate risk.

Bitsight also enables you to:

• Identify digital assets. View your attack surface on a centralized dashboard that shows the location of your digital assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit.
• Understand risk. Bitsight shows the cyber risk associated with each asset. With Bitsight, you can visualize areas of critical or excessive risk and identify areas of highest exposure to prioritize remediation.
• Reveal shadow IT. Uncover cloud instances and hidden assets that circumvent your security controls. Assess each element of shadow IT for risk and bring it in line with corporate security policies.
• Monitor risk in cloud environments. Gain visibility into the risk profile and security posture of your assets stored in cloud environments.

The Attack Surface Beyond the Corporate Network

With more employees working remotely and from home, your attack surface becomes larger and more difficult to protect. Remote and home networks are often unmonitored and less protected. As a result, they’re more likely to be infected with malware and to expose vulnerable services.

Bitsight helps to gain visibility into this expanded operating environment. With Bitsight, security teams can identify risk within remote networks and determine appropriate mitigation measures.

Identify risky IP addresses

Bitsight’s mapping capability enables visibility of potential security issues associated with remote offices vs. corporate networks. Cybersecurity analytics let security professionals drill down to identify open ports or compromised systems that can be exploited by attackers. Bitsight provides visibility into risky home office networks as well. 

Enforce remediation

With greater visibility into the risks associated with home office networks, your teams can prioritize mitigation strategies, adopt robust cybersecurity controls, and strengthen security posture beyond the corporate network.

Why protect your attack surface with 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.

The Limits Of SIEM Monitoring

Security information and event management, or SIEM, provides a real-time view of an organization’s security posture and the threats it faces. By aggregating and analyzing data from a wide range of internal sources, SIEM monitoring solutions can spot abnormal behavioral, detect threats, pinpoint security breaches, and issue alerts for IT staff to follow up on.

However, SIEM solutions alone can’t provide organizations with comprehensive approach to improving security performance or managing risk. To augment the valuable insight produced by SIEM monitoring solutions, organizations need additional tools that can strengthen their security programs with objective, independently validated information. They need tools for benchmarking performance, and solutions that can help organizations better manage third-party risk. That’s why, when seeking a clearer view of their security posture, a growing number of organizations around the world are turning to Security Ratings from Bitsight.

SIEM Monitoring VS. Security Ratings

Many organizations are unsure whether they need both a SIEM monitoring solution and a security ratings solution. Both offer significant value but provide very different perspectives on security.

SIEM software collects log and event data from a wide range of sources: applications, network devices, domain controllers, servers, firewall logs, and other sources. Combining vast amounts of data on a centralized platform, SIEM technology performs analysis to identify threats and enable security teams to follow up on alerts.

The intelligence produced by SIEM solutions is based solely on internal sources and provides no external data that can offer context. SIEM monitoring can’t show an organization what its attack surface looks like from the outside, or how its cybersecurity posture has measurably improved over time. And SIEM technology can flood IT teams with alerts without offering any help to prioritize them for remediation.

That’s where security ratings can help. Providing an objective, verifiable view of an organization’s security posture, security ratings are designed to provide greater visibility into an attack surface and reveal vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure. Security ratings enable organizations to easily benchmark their performance over time. And where a flood of alerts from SIEM monitoring can easily overwhelm an IT staff, security ratings help to provide context and clarity that lets teams to easily prioritize remediation efforts on areas of greatest risk.

Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight Security Ratings provide a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Like credit scores, Bitsight ratings are an outside-in view of security posture – they’re based solely on information that is externally available, and they require no internal information from the rated organization.

Updated daily, Bitsight Security Ratings can serve as a tool for continuous monitoring of an organization and its third-party network. Ratings are calculated on objective data that details an organization’s security performance in relation to 25 risk vectors in four general categories: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Ratings run from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – higher ratings indicate that an organization is more effective at implementing good security practices.

Most important, external research shows that Bitsight security ratings correlate to data breaches, providing organizations with extraordinary insight into their own vulnerabilities and those of their vendors. For example, companies with a Bitsight Security Rating of 700 or higher are nearly 5 times less likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 500 or lower.

Solutions to Complement SIEM Monitoring

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides organizations with a number of solutions that help to solve complex cyber risk challenges when implemented alongside SIEM solutions.

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables security teams to continuously monitor, measure, and communicate the efficacy of cybersecurity controls they have in place to secure the organization. With Bitsight, organizations can rely on continuous cyber security monitoring to gain clear visibility into the performance of their security program and align investments and actions to deliver the highest impact over time. Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables security teams to efficiently allocate limited resources to the areas of highest cyber and cloud security risk, and to support data-driven conversations with key stakeholders around issues of cybersecurity governance. Bitsight also offers the capability to financially quantify the risk living on an organization’s network to help prioritize risks that would cost an organization the most if acted upon.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides the automated tools risk managers need to continuously measure and monitor the security posture of all vendors connected to their network. Bitsight immediately exposes cyber risk within a supply chain, helping risk management teams to work with vendors to achieve measurable risk reduction. With Bitsight, organizations have clearer insight into the most significant risk issues impacting each vendor, enabling an adaptive and tiered approach to prioritizing remediation within an organization’s third-party cyber risk management program.

Why Trust Bitsight for Monitoring Security Performance?

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 Attack Surface Monitoring?