The value of risk-based information security presentations

As the cybersecurity landscape evolves more quickly than ever, effective communication between security professionals, executives and the Board is essential for preventing security incidents. Too often, however, cyber security presentations provide numbers and data without the insight or context that allow stakeholders to draw accurate and helpful conclusions from the information. Reports are often too voluminous, too incomplete, or too technical to be effective, preventing the kind of communication that can focus resources and align efforts to prevent a breach.

Bitsight can help. As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight offers solutions for risk-based reporting that can enable information security presentations to be simpler and more insightful. Bitsight helps security professionals to provide cyber security information with actionable context, highlighting the value of cybersecurity efforts and ensuring that their organization is getting the most out of limited time and resources.

Elements of risk-based security presentation

Risk-based reporting is an approach to communication that is best suited to reducing an organization’s actual exposure to cyber threats. By preparing risk-based information security presentations, security teams can focus attention and resources on the most significant issues to ensure optimal progress toward improving security posture.

Context is critical for risk-based information security presentations. Metrics presented in a vacuum are difficult to understand and rarely actionable. For example, knowing that a firewall has stopped 1200 potential intrusions means nothing without context that reveals whether that number is high, low, or average. Context can include everything from security benchmarking that compares current and past performance to financial quantification of cyber risk or information on how current efforts align to standard cybersecurity frameworks.

Additionally, the elements of a risk-based information security presentation may include:

• Reports that place the highest-risk items front and center.
• Risk scores attached to key findings or recommendations.
• Risk framed in business terms to help executives and leaders understand the ramifications of metrics.
• Frequent reporting on critical items, or the use of continuous monitoring dashboards that keep the most important metrics in front of stakeholders.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

Bitsight Security Ratings empower businesses with the insight to seamlessly identify and measure cyber risk – and to communicate with stakeholders via risk-based information security presentations.

Bitsight Security Ratings are a data-driven measurement of an organization’s security performance. Like credit ratings, Bitsight’s ratings are generated through analysis of externally observable data – no information is required from rated entities. This outside-in approach ensures a more accurate and objective assessment of security performance. In fact, Bitsight ratings are the only security ratings proven to correlate with risk of data breach.

Bitsight produces daily ratings for over 540,000 organizations. Each day, Bitsight processes 250 billion security measurements gathered from 120+ sources. This data concerns 25 key risk vectors that fall into four major categories: evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Using a proprietary algorithm, Bitsight issues a rating from 250 to 900 for each organization, with higher numbers correlating with stronger security performance. In addition to this overall score, Bitsight’s ratings can provide granular detail about risks and vulnerabilities across an organization’s attack surface.

Through daily security ratings, centralized dashboards, and reporting tools, Bitsight enables security teams to simplify reporting and deliver risk-based information security presentations. These reports can improve security posture by facilitating the communication that can focus investments and align resources to deliver the highest impact. Bitsight’s ratings also enable more accurate security assessments, third-party risk assessments, and cloud security audits.

Bitsight solutions for information security presentations

Bitsight delivers a suite of solutions based on industry-leading security ratings that support risk-based reporting and more effective information security presentations.

Bitsight Executive Reports

Bitsight Executive Reports simplify the task of compiling metrics for risk-based information security presentations. Bitsight Security Ratings and metrics can be easily understood by everyone in the organization, including individuals without a technical background. Users can create custom reports on the fly or leverage readily available reports and cybersecurity executive summary examples to produce reports quickly. Bitsight makes it easy to pull a wide range of metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard that reveals granular detail on compromised systems and vulnerabilities, security diligence and protocols, user behavior risks, and network infrastructure.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight provides the quantified baseline and comparative data that’s essential for security benchmarking. By continuously analyzing, rating, and monitoring the security posture of companies and their vendors, Bitsight enables organizations to measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to industry peers, and communicate key indicators to the Board.

Bitsight Financial Quantification of Enterprise Cyber Risk

This Bitsight solution provides the business context and data-driven metrics to quantify cyber risk financially. By analyzing potential financial exposure across multiple types of cyber events and impact scenarios, Bitsight helps organizations make better, faster decisions on how to prioritize investments for risk reduction.

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 cyber security risk assessment?

A cyber security risk assessment evaluates potential areas of risk within an organization’s digital ecosystem and supply chain. Risk assessments identify the severity of risk to help prioritize resources for remediation. Risk assessments can help to improve and streamline security, financial, and operational risk management.

The value of a cyber security risk assessment report sample

Conducting a cyber risk assessment can be a big task, but using templates and sample reports can help to streamline efforts. Working with a cyber security risk assessment report sample helps to ensure you’re conforming with cyber risk best practices and checking every box to assess risk across all categories.

Choosing the right cyber security risk assessment report sample is important, and there are plenty of exceptional frameworks to work with. From the NIST Cyber security Framework to the CIS Critical Security Controls, these samples and templates are developed by experts with backgrounds in cyber security risk management. However, any cyber security risk assessment report sample will need to be personalized for the specific needs and risk thresholds of your organization, using metrics that identify and assess risk to your digital ecosystem and supply chain security.

Bitsight can help. With the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight provides security and risk managers with all the tools they need to measure their organization’s security performance and evaluate third party cyber risk.

Choosing a sample cyber security risk assessment report

When selecting a cyber security risk assessment report sample to work with, there are several gold standard frameworks to choose from.

CIS Critical Security Controls

Formally known as the SANS Topic 20, the CIS Critical Security Controls was created by public and private sector experts to help companies efficiently implement an effective security program. This framework lists best technology practices that organizations can implement to address their most critical vulnerabilities.

NIST Cyber Security Framework

The NIST Cyber Security Framework is another public and private sector collaboration that’s designed to simplify the process of security assessment and governance. NIST is created for owners and operators of critical infrastructure, but it can be used by any company.

ISO 27000

ISO 27000 is an international framework created by the Internal Organization for Standardization to highlight best practices for information security management systems.

Additionally, Bitsight offers an eBook – 40 Questions You Should Have In Your Vendor Security Assessment – that can help to jumpstart your risk assessment process. This resource is an excellent cyber security risk assessment report sample that blends the NIST and CIS frameworks.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform transforms how companies manage third party risk and cyber security performance. Bitsight delivers actionable Security Ratings, cyber risk metrics, and security benchmarks by continuously monitoring large pools of objective and independently verify data. Generated daily, Bitsight ratings range from 250 to 900, with higher numbers correlating to stronger security performance.

Bitsight ratings are based on externally verifiable information drawn from 120+ sources. Every day, Bitsight processes 250 billion security measurements concerning 25 key risk vectors that followed the four categories: publicly disclosed breaches, evidence of compromised systems, user behavior, and security diligence. Using a proprietary algorithm to analyze and classify this data, Bitsight produces both an overall security rating for each company as well as granular detail and grades on security performance in specific areas.

As part of a cyber security risk assessment report, Bitsight ratings provide a clear view of a company’s security posture as well as the security performance of third-party vendors. Bitsight Security Ratings also reveal specific areas of risk and the severity of risk within a digital ecosystem, helping security and risk teams to prioritize time and resources for remediation. Bitsight Security Ratings are universal, and can help compare multiple organizations’ security posture, or internal performance over time.

Bitsight Executive Reports

Bitsight Executive Reports help make security data accessible across business units and to the C-suite and the Board of Directors by using common business language to summarize cybersecurity performance. Executive Reports facilitate data-driven conversations to help organizations identify gaps in their risk and security programs and prioritize resources for improvement.

Users can leverage a variety of standard report templates – including cyber security risk assessment report samples – or create custom reports based on their business’s needs. Bitsight’s reporting capabilities are intuitive – users do not need specific technical knowledge to produce a cyber security risk assessment report in Bitsight.

Centralized reporting

With all reporting functions in one location, users can find report formats or cyber security risk assessment report samples in seconds and export documents with a few clicks.

Custom-defined inputs

Security and risk managers can use the Custom Reporting Engine to create custom communications based on pre-defined reports and cyber security risk assessment report samples. This allows organizations to focus on the risks that matter most to their organization’s goals.

Actionable metrics

Bitsight Executive Reports make it easy to view performance of multiple vendors in a single view and determine where security practices may be falling below acceptable risk thresholds.

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. 

Creating risk-based cyber security presentations

As organizations seek to adapt to an evolving threat landscape, a risk-based approach to cyber security presentations can help improve security posture and prevent massive cyber incidents.

Reports and presentations around security are often filled with too much raw data and too little context, preventing stakeholders from grasping and interpreting the most relevant findings. As a result, critical cyber security information is likely to be overlooked, leading to less effective security efforts and greater risk of breach. On the other hand, a risk-based approach to presentations can ensure that the highest-risk items are front and center, and that each finding is assigned a score that helps identify the most significant risks.

As the world’s leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight provides reporting and presentation tools that streamline risk-based reporting, provide actionable context, and ensure organizations are getting the most of their security resources.

What do risk-based presentations look like?

Risk-based cyber security presentations provide actionable information and context to convey results in a clear, easily understandable language that makes sense to all business stakeholders. In contrast to compliance-based or incident-based reporting, risk-based presentations highlight the role that specific numbers, vulnerabilities, and decisions play in the overall risk landscape of the organization.

Context is critical to a risk-based information security presentation. This may include anything from comparing current numbers to past performance or financially quantifying cyber risk to help executives and Board members understand the business impact a security program can have on the bottom line.

There are many ways to develop risk-based cyber security presentations, but these reports tend to include several critical elements.

• The highest-risk items are placed front and center of the report.
• Key findings and recommendations are assigned a risk score, helping stakeholders to understand their value in risk mitigation.
• Findings are placed in context by comparing metrics to past performance, peers, and competitors.
• Risk is framed in business terms – often with financial quantification – to help executives and leaders understand the real ramifications of findings.

For security teams wanting to adopt a risk-based approach to cyber security presentations, Bitsight offers leading solutions that streamline reporting and make findings understandable and accessible for organizational leadership.

Simplify cyber security presentations with Bitsight

Bitsight transforms how companies manage information security risk with objective, verifiable, and actionable Security Ratings. Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings platform provides dynamic measurements of an organization’s overall security posture as well as granular detail about security performance across 23 key risk vectors.

Bitsight also provides a suite of solutions for easily communicating the findings of Security Ratings through risk-based cyber security presentations and reports.

Bitsight Executive Reports

Bitsight Executive Reports drive more informative and productive conversations about cyber risk, bridging the communications gap between risk management and executive teams. Executive Reports help identify gaps in risk and security programs and determine what resources are needed most for improvement. Reporting in the Bitsight platform is intuitive and does not require technical knowledge. Users can leverage more than a dozen readily available reports, including cybersecurity executive summary examples and templates, historical performance reports, and breakdowns of key performance indicators.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight’s security benchmarking solution makes it easy to assess and monitor security posture and benchmark security performance against industry standards. With Bitsight, security teams can measure the impact of risk mitigation efforts, and gauge reporting progress and results contextually through risk-based cyber security presentations.

Bitsight Financial Quantification for Enterprise Cyber Risk

This Bitsight solution enables risk managers to easily quantify cyber risk financially without relying on outside consultants or undergoing long data collection processes. With insight into the monetary impact of specific areas of risk, risk leaders can more easily communicate key findings with executives and Board members through risk-based cyber security presentations.

How Bitsight Security Ratings work

Bitsight’s Security Ratings are the foundation to the Bitsight. Bitsight ratings provide dynamic measurement of the cyber security posture of an organization and its vendors based on objective, verifiable date. Ratings range from 250 to 900 – the higher the rating, the stronger the organization’s security posture and the lower chance of a suffering a data breach.

To rate an organization, Bitsight leverages externally observable data from sources around the world, mapping it to individual organizations. Ratings are based on terabytes of information that fall into four categories of data: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and public disclosures of breach.

Bitsight’s ratings provide a continuous monitoring solution that delivers near-real-time insights into the security posture of organizations and third-party vendors. Security Ratings also offer critical insights for cybersecurity KPI dashboards, and serve as a common language that can be understood and spoken by both technical and non-technical individuals, facilitating conversations with stakeholders throughout the organization.

In addition to reporting and presentations, Bitsight Security Ratings are invaluable tools in cyber risk assessments, third-party risk management, and cloud security audits.

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.

Do you know where your security performance gaps are?

Your digital footprint is expanding – which means you have a lot more technology and data to keep track of and to secure. Fortunately, you have lots of tools to do that – from perimeter firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS), to endpoint security and SIEM systems for analyzing and responding to threats.

However, because no security system is completely foolproof, there are bound to be gaps in your existing security controls. From open ports to missing patches, these security performance gaps leave you open to attacks like ransomware that exploit vulnerabilities to install malicious software on a system.

Visibility is the key to identifying and remediating security performance gaps. To understand what’s going on in your digital ecosystem and where your cybersecurity risk is concentrated, you need a way to gain comprehensive visibility into your attack surface.

Bitsight can help. The Bitsight Security Ratings platform enables you to visualize your environment, improve cyber hygiene, identify security performance gaps, and take swift action to remediate problems.

Where to look for security performance gaps

Security performance gaps can occur anywhere in your IT environment, including:

On-premises infrastructure

Teams can potentially overlook on-premises assets when it comes to patching, updates, and configuration – opening them up to known vulnerabilities.

Endpoints

User’s endpoints are often the weakest link in the security chain. From malware to spam propagation and filesharing, your users are doing a lot on these devices you may not be aware of.

SIEMs

Your SIEM logs everything that’s happening in your network. But without the vital context you need to understand the raw data, there may be performance gaps you’re not seeing.

Firewall

Your firewall defends your perimeter. But when so much of your business happens outside the network—including shadow IT—it may not be catching every threat entering or leaving your IT environment.

Cloud infrastructure Every cloud instance must be properly configured, managed, and monitored according to a shared responsibility model. Without clear visibility into your cloud assets, it’s hard to know if everything is properly configured and secured. Shadow IT Cloud services make it easy to spin up new instances or web services. Many of these may not be on your radar—and may be putting your organization at risk of breach. Digital footprint From forgotten domains and old URLs to rogue IP addresses, your digital footprint is likely a lot larger than you think. Digital assets you’re unaware of can represent security performance gaps.

Closing security performance gaps with Bitsight

Bitsight offers an industry-leading Security Ratings platform that delivers instant visibility into your attack surface and any security performance gaps within it. Bitsight bases security ratings on independent, objective information and offers a data-driven measurement of an organization’s security performance. Much like credit ratings, Bitsight Security Ratings are an outside-in view of performance generated through externally observable data.

To deliver greater visibility, Bitsight continuously measures performance and issues daily ratings and alerts. Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the rating, the stronger the organization’s security posture. Ratings are based on 23 risk vectors across four areas of security: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches.

In addition to overall security performance, Bitsight Security Ratings illuminate security performance gaps in specific areas of an IT environment. For example, the Bitsight platform evaluates open ports to determine whether or not unnecessary access points exist. And, Bitsight analyzes security configurations such as SSL, SPF, DKIM, and DNSSEC to measure a company’s effectiveness in implementing these controls.

In addition to identifying security performance gaps, Bitsight Security Ratings help mitigate third-party risk, improve cloud security posture management, and conform with the guidelines of a cybersecurity maturity model such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics, part of the Bitsight Security Ratings platform, provides deep visibility into an increasingly complex attack surface. IT teams get a handle on the security performance gaps and risk hidden across digital assets in the cloud, geographies, subsidiaries, and your remote workforce. Specifically, Bitsight Security Ratings helps you:

Visualize digital assets

Bitsight’s centralized dashboard shows the location of each digital asset broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit. The dashboard also reveals the risk associated with each asset, helping to accelerate remediation.

Uncover shadow IT

Bitsight can help security teams uncover hidden assets and cloud instances, assess them for risk, and bring them in line with corporate security policies.

Identify concentrated risk

With an ecosystem-wide view of your digital footprint, teams visualize areas of excessive risk, determine areas of highest exposure, and prioritize remediation of the most critical security performance gaps.

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.

Optimizing programs with security benchmarking

The practice of benchmarking has been an invaluable tool for businesses as they seek to improve performance in sales, profits, productivity, and marketing effectiveness. Yet, most organizations have been unable to employ benchmarking to enhance security performance.

There’s a simple reason for this: benchmarking requires clear, simple, quantifiable metrics that teams track and compare over time. Traditionally, teams measure security performance with highly technical cyber security information or point-in-time indicators that don’t deliver the clarity or continuous measurements benchmarking requires. A continuous, data-driven measure of security benchmarking enables companies to easily assess and monitor cybersecurity posture, measure the impact of mitigation efforts, and benchmark performance against peers.

The benefits of security benchmarking

With quantitative and objective data about the effectiveness of your security programs, you can easily benchmark security performance to measure progress over time and compare your performance to peers and competitors. Bitsight has seen proven success in security benchmarking for organizations both large and small to deliver significant benefits for security teams. The security benchmarking capabilities offered by Bitsight helps companies to:

Optimize performance

By benchmarking and monitoring metrics over time, you can identify specific areas for improvement and track progress toward specific goals with greater clarity.

Improve reporting

Communicating security performance with the Board and C-suite is often challenging, as the metrics in a cybersecurity KPI dashboard are often highly technical and difficult understand. With simple metrics such as botnet infections and number of open ports, security benchmarking makes it easier to develop information security presentations that show progress in terms that people without an IT background can understand.

Justify resources

Too often, senior leadership views IT security as a cost center rather than an area that supports business growth. Security benchmarking can help shift the focus on your security programs away from cost and toward strategic initiatives that support a company’s competitive edge.

Evaluate tools

The specificity of Bitsight’s benchmarking data makes it easy to evaluate the effectiveness of cybersecurity programs by tracking performance with and without specific technologies and controls.

Maintain competitiveness

With benchmarks that provide comparisons to industry peers, you can understand quickly how your security programs stack up and where you’re falling behind or outpacing competitors.

Set actionable goals

Benchmarking security programs allows you to set actionable goals instead of theoretical ones. Rather than general objectives around reducing risk, you can establish goals to make progress on specific metrics within a certain timeframe.

The advantages of security benchmarking with Bitsight

Bitsight offers clear benefits for security and risk leaders.

Proactively identify security issues

Security benchmarking with Bitsight provides clear insight into compromised systems, user behavior risks, and security diligence within industry peers. This intelligence makes it easier to understand which infections are targeting peers and competitors, delivering insight into industry-specific threats and security diligence standards throughout your industry. Bitsight Security Ratings address all areas of security performance and helps security teams manage a cloud security audit as you move more resources to the cloud.

Improve reputational risk management

Bitsight benchmarking lets you use security as a competitive advantage, demonstrating the progress of your security programs for customers, investors, and partners.

Remediate issues with detailed forensics

Bitsight’s actionable Forensics package shows infections observed on your network in great detail, delivering the specifics your security teams need to remediate potentially harmful issues.

Justify security investments

Bitsight’s reporting capabilities make it easy to communicate security metrics to executive leadership and the Board in clear cyber security presentations, documenting security performance in relation to peers and competitors. By documenting the impact of security programs, you can more easily justify investments and advocate for increased cybersecurity resources. Bitsight’s reporting tools enable you to quickly develop custom reports or to take advantage of readily available reports, templates, and cybersecurity executive summary examples.

Why 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 a cybersecurity KPI dashboard?

A cybersecurity KPI dashboard displays high-level information about an organization’s security posture and level of cyber risk.

Cybersecurity KPI dashboards are especially effective at communicating risk to executives and Board members, helping them to make smarter and well-informed decisions about funding and resources for cybersecurity programs. Cybersecurity KPI dashboards summarize program performance in one view to make it easy to compare program performance over time.

The value of a cybersecurity KPI dashboard

A cybersecurity KPI dashboard is an essential tool for security and risk professionals as they seek to remediate risk and improve the security posture of their organization. Dashboards are an effective way of communicating with leadership on the Board and in the C-suite, boiling down volumes of technical details into easy-to-understand metrics that can facilitate data-driven conversations about risk and security.

As part of its industry-leading Security Ratings platform, Bitsight offers reporting tools and dashboards that can help security and risk teams share the most important KPIs with leadership quickly and easily.

Choosing KPIs for a cybersecurity dashboard

Choosing metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard or cyber security presentation can be a high-stakes exercise. The right KPIs can help executives and Board members clearly understand the risks facing the organization and gain their support for budgets and programs. On the other hand, KPIs that are too technical or confusing can derail discussions or fail to gain traction.

These criteria can help you decide whether a KPI is helpful for any information security presentation:

Is it accurate and important?

Metrics that have large margins of error or rely too heavily on guesswork make ineffective KPIs. Metrics that focus on insignificant areas of cybersecurity only take up space in conversation and are not helpful.

Will it be understood by individuals with non-technical backgrounds?

Many executives and Board members don’t have the background to interpret highly technical cybersecurity metrics. When sharing a cybersecurity KPI dashboard with these individuals, it’s best to stick with metrics that easily tie into business success without a detailed explanation.

Can it be calculated quickly and easily?

The most important KPIs should be checked often in order to monitor their progress over time. Cyber security information that requires hours to export, manipulate, and calculate will be difficult to include in regular reports and dashboards.

Important metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard

Here are examples of at-a-glance metrics Bitsight can provide for your cybersecurity KPI dashboard.

• Bitsight Security Rating – indicates overall security performance and correlates to the likelihood of a data breach.
• Botnet infection grade – based on the frequency, severity, and duration of botnet infections.
• Peer-to-peer filesharing grade – indicates how much P2P activity took place on a network within the last 60 days and compares that performance to other organizations.
• Open port grade – shows how well-sealed an organization’s network is by comparing the number of open ports to other organizations.
• Average vendor security rating over time – reveals whether third-party risk management programs are meeting an organization’s security requirements.
• Average industry security rating – provides context for an organization’s own cybersecurity performance.
• Patching cadence grade – identifies how long it takes security teams to apply critical security patches on average, compared to other organizations.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

The Bitsight platform is the most widely used Security Ratings service in the world. As a data-driven and dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance, Bitsight’s daily ratings provide near-real-time visibility into risk within an organization’s digital footprint and supply chain.

Bitsight provides both an overall rating of an organization’s security posture and grades that offer granular detail about security performance related to 25 key risk vectors. This data serves as the foundation for a suite of solutions that can help security teams mitigate risk, improve security posture, and communicate clearly with everyone in the organization. Bitsight Security Ratings provide data for security performance management, third-party cyber risk assessments, cloud security audits, and other data-driven initiatives.

Bitsight offers several solutions that provide helpful metrics and organization for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

To deliver greater visibility into your expanding digital ecosystem, Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics provides a dashboard that reveals where all assets are located and what risks they represent. This centralized, cybersecurity KPI dashboard shows assets broken down by cloud provider, geography, and business unit and assesses the corresponding risk that each asset presents. Security teams can overlay assets with objective, quantifiable cybersecurity insights on the Bitsight platform. This can improve understanding of which groups and types of assets are properly secured, and which ones represent the greatest potential for cyber risk.

Bitsight Security Ratings for Benchmarking

Bitsight’s security benchmarking solution helps show the impact of security programs over time. By providing a quantified baseline and comparative data, this solution enables teams to measure the effectiveness of risk mitigation programs, compare performance to industry peers, and communicate KPIs to executives and the Board.

Bitsight Executive Reports

Bitsight’s reporting capabilities make security performance efficient to understand and discuss with the Board and C-Suite to drive more productive conversations about cyber risk. With Bitsight Executive Reports, security and risk professionals can quickly pull easy-to-understand metrics for a cybersecurity KPI dashboard. Readily available reports and templates with cybersecurity executive summary examples help risk managers develop presentations quickly, and users can easily customize reports to provide KPIs for specific audiences.

Why manage security KPIs 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.