What is security reporting?

Security reporting is the practice of communicating metrics about security, risk, and the performance of security controls to stakeholders throughout an organization. Executives, boards, security and risk leaders, and security practitioners all require robust reporting to better understand the security landscape and make data-driven decisions about managing risk and enhancing security performance.

Driving data-driven risk decisions with security reporting

Security and risk management professionals today are under great scrutiny. Their companies have spent heavily on cybersecurity programs over the years, and their executives and board members want to understand the return on the substantial investment they’ve made. These stakeholders are also keenly aware of their responsibility for oversight, and they want security reporting that can drive data-driven decisions and conversations about security and risk.

Yet, for security and risk managers, compiling the right metrics for a cyber security report has traditionally been time-consuming and challenging. Many reporting solutions include metrics that are too detailed or too vague to be helpful. Other solutions fail to provide the context that would make the data meaningful to executives and board members who are not steeped in the technical details of cybersecurity.

Bitsight can help. Bitsight’s daily Security Ratings provide a dynamic, data-driven measurement of the security performance of companies and the cybersecurity posture of their vendors. Leveraging this data, security leaders and risk managers can produce cybersecurity reports that effectively measure, manage, and clearly communicate their security programs to senior leadership, board members, and external stakeholders.

What to include in security reporting for the board

Boards and C-suite executives want to be focused on cybersecurity, but they often lack specific knowledge of technical details. Consequently, security reporting at the board and executive level must frame risk in business terms and help leadership understand how cybersecurity impacts the company directly.

Context is critical. Board members and executives won’t have any idea how to interpret data about the number of intrusions in a detection system, for example. To make that information meaningful, it must be presented as part of an historical trend, or as a report that compares the company to competitors and peers. The context for a cyber risk report may include information about past performance, how the metrics appear in different business units, how they compare to peers and competitors, and how they align with cybersecurity frameworks.

When providing metrics, it’s important to only include data that meaningfully communicates risk exposure or security performance. When security leaders provide too much data, it’s harder for the most important areas of risk to get the focus they need. The most pertinent types of metrics include audit and compliance metrics, especially information around fulfillment of legal requirements. Operational effectiveness metrics are also essential – these are the quantitative, down-to-earth metrics that reveal the reality of risk and security performance.

Bitsight Security Ratings enable security reporting that delivers the context and essential metrics required for effective oversight and data-driven decision-making about the investments, priorities, and programs required to measure and reduce cyber risk.

Security reporting with Bitsight

Bitsight reporting capabilities make security performance understandable and accessible to senior leadership, driving more productive conversations about cyber risk. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities allow security and risk management professionals to quickly pull the metrics that are critical to decisions about cybersecurity budgets and programs. Security and risk teams can leverage readily available reports on the security performance of their organization and vendor portfolio or create custom reports on the fly. Security reporting with Bitsight is intuitive and does not require technical knowledge.

Bitsight reports provide:

• Effective communication. Bitsight security reporting encourages data-driven conversations about cyber risk in the business ecosystem.
• Centralized reporting. Reports about security performance and vendor risk can be accessed from a single location in the Bitsight platform giving you a cybersecurity KPI dashboard.
• Customer-defined inputs. Security and risk managers can query their data in the Bitsight platform to produce custom reports that address the organization’s risk tolerance and profile.
• Actionable metrics. Bitsight security reporting allows organizations to determine if their programs and vendors are meeting security performance standards, enabling security teams to take action to remediate vulnerabilities.

Categories of reporting in Bitsight

Bitsight offers several categories of reports that enable security and risk managers to successfully communicate essential metrics and context to board members and executives.

Overview and executive reports are designed specifically for senior leadership. These reports provide straightforward facts about the impact of investments directed at cybersecurity and third-party risk programs. Overview and executive reports provide answers to the common questions posed by company stakeholders, and they facilitate the data-driven conversations about risk and security that are essential to oversight of cybersecurity efforts.

Comparison reports provide a detailed look at how every aspect of a security program compares to the efforts of other companies – including industry leaders, competitors, business partners, and vendors. Leaders can gain insight into the security performance of their peers and critical organizations in their network. Third-party risk managers can use comparison reports to decide between vendors during the onboarding process.

History and trend reports provide historical context that make metrics more meaningful. Security leaders can identify the types of threats that have most impacted their programs over time and which risk-based decisions were most effective at mitigating threats. Third-party risk managers can see which vendors have historically been most vulnerable to bad actors. Trend reports can show which vendors, industries, or tiers have changed over time. Trend reports can also highlight past vulnerabilities and areas of risk that should be the subject of ongoing cyber security monitoring.

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.

FAQs: What is security reporting?

Managing Risk With Cybersecurity Analytics

Your digital ecosystem is constantly expanding. New cloud services, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, and more employees working from home all contribute to an IT environment with greater agility and productivity – but more risk as well. These new technologies expand your attack surface, introducing new vulnerabilities and potentially exposing endpoints to cyber threats.

Visibility is a constant challenge with this new, growing digital footprint. As your digital ecosystem expands outside your network perimeter, it becomes harder to understand where all your critical assets live and what risks are present there.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics gives you visibility into your entire attack surface, allowing you to easily discover and track the assets, applications, and devices that are part of your growing digital footprint. With Bitsight’s cybersecurity analytics, you can assess risk exposure, prioritize high-risk endpoints, and build an effective security program to reduce risk.

The Challenges Of Quantifying Cyber Risk

Understanding risk within your IT environment is essential to maintaining your cybersecurity posture. As your digital ecosystem evolves, there are three key elements of cybersecurity analytics that are essential to quantifying cyber risk.

• Visibility. In order to manage your security performance and put strong cybersecurity controls in place, you must be able to see your entire attack surface and identify the risks to your digital assets in the cloud, geographies, subsidiaries, and your remote workforce. Yet, as your digital ecosystem becomes more complex, visibility is harder to achieve.
• Context. As your digital footprint continues to grow, your security team may need to filter through massive amounts of data to find the most potentially severe threats or security events. This time-consuming process can be shortened with the right external insight, which can help to prioritize remediation efforts effectively.
• A security framework. Effective cybersecurity management requires that disparate systems and teams share a common language when discussing KPIs, vulnerabilities, and cybersecurity questions. Without this common security framework, it can be difficult to work towards an organization-wide understanding of security performance and cyber risk.

As you work to protect your digital ecosystem with greater visibility, security context, and a common framework, cybersecurity analytics from Bitsight can help.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

As the world’s leading provider of Security Rating Services, Bitsight delivers a powerful cybersecurity analytics solution with Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics. With Bitsight, you gain continuous visibility into your digital ecosystem, allowing you to understand, quantify, and manage cyber risk more effectively.

Bitsight’s cybersecurity analytics solution provides a centralized dashboard where you can view the location of all your digital endpoints broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit. By identifying the corresponding cyber risk metrics for your organization’s needs, you can quickly develop a plan for remediation. Bitsight also makes it easy to develop cyber security reports that can be shared with organizational leaders and the board.

With Bitsight, you can gain visibility into:

• Shadow IT. Bitsight cyber risk analytics let you discover hidden vulnerabilities and cloud instances and assess them for risk. With this knowledge, you can bring shadow IT in line with corporate security policies.
• Areas of disproportionate risk. With complete view of your digital endpoints across your ecosystem, you can view areas of critical or excessive risk, determine areas of highest exposure, and prioritize remediation efforts.
• Risk hidden in cloud environments. The shared security models of cloud providers make it difficult to assess the security posture of your cloud-hosted data. Bitsight’s cybersecurity analytics addresses this challenge by providing visibility into the risk profile of data stored in cloud environments.
• Risk on remote networks. Monitor the risk of your expanding attack surface in home and remote offices, identifying and tracking unmonitored and insecure endpoints.

Cybersecurity Analytics To Manage Risk In Your Remote Workforce

As your remote workforce continues to expand, the risk associated with remote and home offices grows as well. Employees working outside the office tend to rely on unmonitored and less protected networks that represent a greater exposure to malware, and are connecting to company data with internet utilized by others in their household.

Bitsight’s cybersecurity analytics provides greater visibility into this expanded operating environment. With Bitsight, you can discover the risks associated with your remote workforce and take swift action to mitigate it.

Bitsight offers a mapping capability that helps discover risk on remote office IP addresses. You can view the security issues associated with remote offices vs. corporate network, and view details of compromised systems or open ports that could be exploited by attackers.

Bitsight’s technology also lets you prioritize risk mitigation strategies and enforce remediation beyond your corporate network. By establishing robust security controls for your remote workforce, on top of requiring security measures for all employees like two-factor authentication or VPN log-in software, you can strengthen the security posture of your entire enterprise.

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. 

FAQs: What Are Cybersecurity Analytics?

The role of data analytics in cybersecurity investments

As your digital ecosystem expands – and threats against it evolve – data analytics can have a critical impact on measuring cyber risks and improving cybersecurity performance management. Complex enterprises often have multiple distinct business units and subsidiaries, with mergers and acquisitions leading to organizational groups in disparate geolocations. The unique structure, function, and digital exposure of each group makes it difficult for security and risk leaders to get a read on risk and identify the likelihood of a cybersecurity attack.

Data analytics and cybersecurity reports from Bitsight provide clear visibility into the security performance of distributed enterprise groups. Based on Bitsight’s trusted insights, Bitsight data analytics takes the guesswork out of identifying concentrations of risk and helps security and risk leaders monitor security programs and allocate limited resources most effectively.

Bitsight cybersecurity data analytics

Bitsight Security Ratings empower businesses with data analytics and cybersecurity reporting, providing the insight required to seamlessly identify and measure cyber risk. Much like credit ratings, Bitsight Security Ratings are generated by analyzing externally observable data and are produced without any information or input from the rated entity.

Our security ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820; the higher the rating, the more effective the company is at implementing effective security practices. Ratings are based on four classes of data: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches.

Our ratings have been independently verified to correlate with an organization’s risk of a data breach. Cyber risk managers rely on Bitsight data analytics and cybersecurity reporting to accurately summarize an organization’s breach risk and prioritize cyber risk mitigation efforts with clear visibility into where the greatest risks exist.

Improving cybersecurity performance with Bitsight ratings

Bitsight Security Ratings leverage an unparalleled dataset to deliver differentiated insights. Our data analytics deliver unique visibility that help your organization make better, smarter decisions around cyber risk strategy and third-party risk management.

With Bitsight, you can access real-time, meaningful, and objective data and metrics on cybersecurity performance in each area of your organization. With visibility into risk throughout your digital footprint, you can easily assess exposure for individual units as well as your organization as a whole. Bitsight provides data analytics and cybersecurity reporting on security performance for each endpoint, enabling you to focus remediation efforts on the areas that will deliver the greatest risk reduction in the shortest period of time.

With Bitsight data analytics and cybersecurity reporting, security teams:

• Align security programs. Bitsight analytics make it easy to align business units, geographies, and subsidiaries into a cohesive and effective security program.
• Visualize areas of disproportionate risk. Bitsight’s ecosystem-wide views of your digital footprint make it easy to assess cyber risk based on areas of highest exposure as well as the security of individual assets.
• Monitor security performance across complex organizations. Bitsight provides an at-a-glance view of the relative security performance of multiple groups within your organization.
• Uncover group-based performance deficiencies. Identify the factors within each area that most significantly impact or detract from overall security performance, including unpatched systems, existing malware infections, and insecure access points.
• Consistently enforce security controls. Automatically create cybersecurity action plans for subsidiaries and measure the impact on parent groups from improvements to subsidiary security performance.
• Benchmark security programs. With daily security ratings for over 140,000 organizations, Bitsight makes it easy to benchmark the relative performance of security programs against the performance of peers and competitors.
• Allocate resources. Prioritize investments and allocate limited resources to the actions that can most effectively move the needle on cybersecurity performance.
• Create improvement plans. Set performance targets and create improvement plans for each enterprise group.
• Deliver effective reports. Confidently measure, manage, and report to the board about the security performance of different units.

Integrating Bitsight cybersecurity data analytics

The Bitsight platform offers intuitive integration with leading vendor risk management (VRM) and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions. By integrating Bitsight’s best in-class data analytics and cybersecurity reporting with VRM and GRC partners, you can streamline your vendor assessment process and gain increased confidence in your security programs and controls.

Our VRM and GRC partners include:

• ServiceNow. Get continuous monitoring and real-time updates on risk within your vendor pool to achieve efficient, technology-based risk reduction.
• Venminder. Confidently assess vendor risk during onboarding.
• ThirdPartyTrust. Drive automated risk reduction with cybersecurity information and data surrounding all vendor relationships, centralized in one encompassing view.
• ProcessUnity. Make quicker, more accurate remediation decisions.
• Archer. Improve workflow efficiency in third-party risk management.
• OneTrust. Implement a consistent third-party risk management program.
• Prevalent. Gain a complete and consistent view of vendor risk intelligence.
• Riskmethods. Improve cyber resilience with an AI-powered platform backed by Bitsight data.
• Coupa. Manage transactions across procurement, payments, and supply chain.
• Interos. Bring visibility to the operational resilience cloud.

Why customers 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.