While benchmarking has helped improve performance in many areas of business, most cybersecurity teams have been unable to take advantage of this powerful tool. The reason: security benchmarks require more than the traditional metrics with point-in-time assessments, subjective judgments, or highly technical KPIs. To reap the value of security benchmarking, security teams need tools that provide continuous, objective, easily understood metrics that offer an externally comparative view of cybersecurity performance over time.
Bitsight can help. Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking offer a continuous, data-driven measure of security performance, allowing businesses to establish a quantified baseline and comparative data. With Bitsight, organizations can benchmark their security performance on a wide set of actionable metrics.
Security ratings provide a baseline that organizations can use to measure their cybersecurity performance across business units and against competitors and peers. By tracking ratings over time and comparing them to the ratings of other companies, security leaders and risk managers can establish security benchmarks that reveal where their organization or department stands.
With security benchmarks, organizations can:
Bitsight Security Ratings offer a data-driven measure of the security performance of an organization and its vendors. Bitsight’s ratings are derived from objective, externally observable and verifiable information and provide a score – from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – that indicates how effective a company is at implementing good security controls.
Bitsight continually analyzes, evaluates, and monitors the security posture of thousands of companies using externally observable data. Ratings are updated daily, and Bitsight issues alerts when a company’s rating changes significantly.
Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking give security leaders visibility into a wealth of risk vector data on their own company as well as their vendors and peers. With security benchmarks from Bitsight, organizations can measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to peers, and communicate KPIs to the board.
Security and risk leaders can use Bitsight’s security benchmarking technology to achieve measurable improvement in security programs. Bitsight enables security teams to:
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.
Reporting is a critical component of any cybersecurity or third-party risk management program. From sharing information with vendors to enable them to remediate network risks, to demonstrating the success of your programs and sharing security benchmarks with the board, cyber risk reports are the tools that keep everyone focused on the same metrics and working toward the same enterprise-wide goals.
However, developing reports that accurately represent your cybersecurity program is not an easy task. Stakeholders have varying levels of knowledge about cybersecurity and may need different levels of detail. Pulling security and risk management metrics from multiple sources can be time-consuming. Ensuring that reports include the right level of context to make metrics meaningful is often a complex endeavor.
Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading security ratings platform, Bitsight provides robust security reporting capabilities that let you quickly and easily prepare the right reports for the right audience while delivering the context that lets your audiences truly understand your findings and make decisions based off of them.
Preparing cyber risk reports for security performance and third-party risk management has traditionally been a complex and time-consuming endeavor. Cyber security reports have several objectives, including:
The challenge of reporting is that every cyber risk report has a different audience. Not only will each report require different metrics, it will need different levels of detail according to the audience’s experience working with third-party risk. Cyber risk reports prepared for security teams will require a level of detail that senior executives and board members may not be able to understand.
Additionally, many reporting tools do not deliver the kind of context that makes metrics meaningful. Putting findings into context may mean comparing metrics to past performance, to peers and competitors, or to industry standards.
Bitsight transforms how companies manage third-party cyber risk. Founded in 2011, Bitsight pioneered the security ratings industry with an outside-in approach to ratings that delivers an objective and verifiable measurement of an organization’s security performance. Through continuous cyber security monitoring, Bitsight generates daily ratings that help organizations make faster, more strategic decisions about third-party risk management and cybersecurity policy.
Bitsight provides immediate insight into the security posture of vendors and cyber risk within your supply chain. Bitsight Security Ratings are also proven to correlate to the risk of a data breach. Research has proven that companies with a security rating of 500 or lower are nearly 5 times more likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 700 or above.1
Based on security ratings that are updated daily, Bitsight’s cyber risk reports provide key findings on security performance of organizations as well as the risk present within their vendor ecosystem. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities provide:
1https://www.air-worldwide.com/Publications/Infographics/Global-Cyber-Resilience/
Bitsight’s reporting capabilities allow your security and risk management teams to easily develop the right report for the right audience.
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.
A cybersecurity executive summary appears at the beginning of a report from security and risk teams and summarizes the most pressing issues concerning the security posture and risk profile of the organization. For example, a cybersecurity executive summary may include key findings as well as summaries of incidents and threats along with recommendations for remediation, programs, and initiatives. A cybersecurity executive summary might include updates on concerning risk vectors from prior reporting cycles.
Reporting on the performance of cyber risk and security programs is critical to avoiding breaches, learning from prior performance, and mitigating risk. Effective communication and decision making between different levels of an organization – from the practitioners and managers on the ground to the C-suite and the Board – can be the difference between keeping systems secure and suffering a massive incident.
However, too many security and risk professionals make mistake of providing information that’s too technical, too detailed, or without context. These reports can be indecipherable for readers who lack a technical background, preventing security leaders from engaging in the clear communication around risk and security programs that’s required to keep the organization safe.
An effective report should capture the highest risk items in a cybersecurity executive summary. For example, aspects of a security program that are significantly underperforming and adding unacceptable risk to the business should be front and center. Effective communications may also include a cybersecurity KPI dashboard that summarizes key findings and recommendations, contextualizing them with risk scores that help the reader understand the severity of risks and the importance of remediation efforts.
As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight provides the tools to accurately assess risk and security performance of an organizations network, as well as their vendors’ risk. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform also includes solutions that can streamline cyber security presentation and reporting, providing templates and examples of cybersecurity executive summaries that help users deliver the most pressing risk information quickly and easily.
An effective cyber security executive summary includes several essential sections.
Every cybersecurity report should begin up front with a summary of the most critical findings and action items in non-technical language that every executive and board member can understand. Key findings can also include security ratings that provide external insight into the organization’s security performance.
This section should outline what was monitored for the report, including the number and locations of monitored servers, devices, and workstations, and the extent to which the organization’s endpoints where assessed. Parts of the IT environment that weren’t monitored should also be mentioned, to clearly identify the scope of the report.
It’s helpful to include a summary of the number of incidents detected and resolved in the cyber executive summary. Depending on the audience, you can provide a breakdown of incidents by type, target, and severity, along with metrics such as the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
In this part of the cyber executive summary, examples and details of the most severe threats faced by the organization can help the reader understand the context of cybersecurity concerns and recommendations. It’s helpful for readers to know about emerging malware trends and recommended actions for stopping them. The threat summary can also include overall or specific levels of financial risk your program is subject to based on the vulnerabilities present.
Recommendations – and the cost of implementing them, if possible – comprise the final section of the cybersecurity executive summary. For example, if a large amount of malware is entering your organization through phishing emails, the recommendations in this section might include stricter enforcement of policies across departments and security awareness training for employees.
Risk-based reporting provides insight and analysis into security risks, delivering findings in context that help the recipient understand the role that the data plays in the overall risk landscape of the organization. Findings are often assigned a risk score, and the highest risk items are typically highlighted front and center in the report, often in the cybersecurity executive summary, for example.
Bitsight Executive Reports help organizations bridge the gap between risk management and executive teams by simplifying and streamlining information security presentations and reporting. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities allow security and risk professionals to quickly pull metrics that matter and are understood by C-suite executives and the Board. To report on the security performance of their organization and vendor portfolio, users can leverage more than a dozen readily available reports with cybersecurity executive summaries, for example, or create custom reports based on their organization’s specific needs.
Pull information about company and vendor security performance into one central location and view in the Bitsight platform.
Quickly determine whether security programs and vendors are meeting security standards and develop a plan of action to remediate vulnerabilities.
Query all data in the Bitsight platform to create flexible, custom reports and executive summaries that speak to the organization’s risk tolerance and profile, or focus in on a specific area of risk the organization has struggled with in the past.
Facilitate easily understood, data-driven conversations about cyber risk in the digital ecosystem.
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.
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