Cybersecurity-related risk is now rated as the second highest source of risk for the enterprise. The stakes are enormous: a cybersecurity breach can result in significant financial harm, damage to reputation, loss of customers’ trust, and loss of data and intellectual property.
Cybersecurity performance management solutions help your organization drive accountability for security outcomes and align investments and actions with the highest measurable impact over time. Ideally, your security performance management program should enable security and risk leaders to efficiently allocate limited resources to the most critical areas of cyber risk. Yet, traditional methods for managing risk and monitoring performance have relied on penetration testing, cyber threat intelligence, and periodic security assessments. These methods only include point-in-time metrics that can’t provide a continuous view of how security programs are performing.
Bitsight offers a modern, more effective way to develop your cyber risk strategy and manage security performance. Bitsight for Security Performance Management (SPM) enables continuous monitoring of security performance through daily security ratings that offer clear, objective, data-driven measurements.
CIOs, CISOs, and other security and risk leaders are constantly required to answer critical security questions:
To answer these questions, security teams have traditionally relied on periodic audits, assessments, and legacy benchmarking methods to quantify cyber risk and measure the effectiveness of security controls. These security analytics often require a great deal of time to aggregate complex metrics, yet the point-in-time results they produce are outdated almost immediately.
Security ratings provide an alternative way to manage cybersecurity performance and to communicate risk to senior executives and board members in a way that’s easy to understand. Security ratings are based on externally observable and verifiable data that’s collected and analyzed daily. Unlike security assessment tools that review a company’s policies or conduct periodic scans, security ratings are based on objective evidence of an organization’s compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. The result is an objective, evidence-based measure of performance that provides clear insight into the effectiveness of security programs and controls.
Armed with daily ratings, you can proactively identify, quantify, and manage cybersecurity risk throughout your ecosystem. Security ratings provide a common language that can be appreciated by both technical and non-technical individuals, facilitating conversations between cybersecurity professionals and executives and board members to improve decision-making around security investments.
Bitsight Security Performance Management makes it easier to build a security program that best fits your risk tolerance and organizational objectives. Providing continuous visibility of your extended digital footprint, SPM facilitates cyber risk oversight and continuously monitors the effectiveness of your security controls. Combining meaningful KPIs with analytical insights, Bitsight simplifies, streamlines, and dramatically improves cybersecurity performance management.
With SPM, your security and risk teams can:
In addition to SPM, Bitsight offers solutions to manage third-party risk, complementing vendor risk assessments with continuous monitoring to strengthen IT vendor risk management.
Unlike traditional assessments and security audits, Bitsight for SPM enables your teams to see what’s working and what isn’t on a daily basis.
Bitsight enables you to track progress over time, setting goals and prioritizing different parts of your program while determining the effectiveness of your investments.
Bitsight security ratings can help your teams decide whether to work with vendors, M&A targets, insurance applicants, integration partners, and other third parties based on the level of cybersecurity risk they represent.
By combining data from security ratings with recent cybersecurity audits, you can effectively determine which parts of your program need resources and investment immediately. Continuous monitoring capabilities enable you to prioritize resources more accurately, focusing on investments that will quickly yield the greatest results.
Bitsight monitors over 40 million organizations and maps 1 million entities. Bitsight enables you to easily compare your own cybersecurity performance management efforts to hundreds or thousands of competitors and peers.
Bitsight security ratings are as easy to understand as a credit score, enabling board members and executives to immediately get a handle on the organization’s cybersecurity performance. Bitsight ratings also provide the data analytics and cybersecurity reporting capabilities that can help your security teams to justify of investments in cybersecurity performance management and demonstrate the measurable improvements that your programs achieve.
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.
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:
Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.
Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.
Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.
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.
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.
Continuous controls monitoring delivers several key advantages for security and risk professionals:
A robust CCM program typically comprises five integrated phases:
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”).
Identify data sources—like vulnerability scanners, endpoint management systems or identity directories—and deploy agents or API connectors to collect relevant telemetry continuously.
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).
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.
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 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:
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 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:
When relying on Bitsight Control Insights, your security teams count on several essential benefits.
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.
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.
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.
Request your free custom report and see how you can start reducing your cyber risk exposure across your digital ecosystem: cloud assets across all geos & subsidiaries; discover shadow IT; security risk findings; and more!
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.
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:
Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.
Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.
Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.
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.
