Developing A Third-Party Cyber Security Risk Management Process

As companies in all sectors bring on new vendors at an accelerating pace, third-party cyber risk management has become more important than ever. Yet with shrinking budgets and smaller headcounts, third-party risk management teams are under extraordinary pressure to onboard vendors faster and with less expense.

The third-party cyber security risk management process is complex and full of difficult decisions. Without an efficient, effective process, managing the onboarding and assessment of hundreds or thousands of vendors can be overwhelming and won’t be done to properly protect your network from cybersecurity risks.

That’s where Bitsight can help. With a suite of technologies built on an industry-leading Security Ratings Service, Bitsight enables your teams to streamline the cyber security risk management process to better mitigate risk to scale your vendor onboarding process to match your organization’s third party risk management needs.

Making Your Risk Management Process More Efficient

Creating a more efficient and scalable cyber security risk management process requires attention to three areas of your risk management program.

Security program policies

The key to onboarding vendors quickly while mitigating risk is to have the right policies in place for the entire vendor lifecycle. For example:v

• Establishing policies around accepted risk thresholds can help to streamline onboarding by winnowing out vendors that don’t meet your security requirements before you spend time fully assessing and onboarding them.
• Collaborating with procurement, legal, compliance, and financial departments will help to make sure that policies accurately reflect the goals of everyone in the organization, and that they are universally agreed on up front.
• Using security ratings can help to streamline vendor onboarding by getting an initial look into a potential vendor’s cybersecurity hygiene, allowing security managers to prioritize the most secure vendors and eliminate non-conforming vendors before they go through an in-depth and time-consuming security assessment.
• Policies that trigger reassessment based on a change in security posture can help to reduce the amount of work in the assessment phases of a third-party risk management program and avoid letting risks linger in your network between auditing cycles.

The reassessment process

• To streamline the reassessment process, many companies are shifting from a standardized approach that treats all vendors equally and asks everyone the same questions, to a tiered approach that manages reassessment based on the risk each vendor poses to the organization. Vendors working closely with business operations and sensitive data will belong to a more critical top tier, while vendors who pose less inherent risk will reside in a lower tier. By spending more time and effort reassessing top-tier vendors and less time with lower tier vendors, your risk management team can save time on the cyber security risk management process while mitigating risk more effectively.
• Choosing continuous monitoring technology rather than yearly or periodic assessments can provide you with immediate alerts when a vendor’s security posture changes. This information can automatically trigger reassessment if the change is concerning.

Communication with the board and executive leadership

• Sharing your cyber security risk management process and findings with your executive leadership and board provides the information they need to make budget decisions and provide educated oversight. Demonstrating success of your cyber risk management framework can help encourage continued support for your efforts. Communicating with this diverse group of leaders requires metrics that make sense to individuals who may not be deeply versed in cybersecurity jargon, along with context that help prioritize the risk associated with each metric.

Bitsight For Third-Party Risk Management

Bitsight facilitates the cyber security risk management process with a solution designed to expose and directly locate risk in your supply chain. Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management works with Bitsight’s industry-leading Security Ratings Service to provide continuous cyber risk monitoring of the security posture of every vendor in your portfolio. By helping to strengthen policies, streamline assessments, and simplify communication, Bitsight enables you to establish a more efficient and effective cyber security risk management process.

Bitsight Security Ratings, an integral part of every Bitsight solution, provide a dynamic measurement of security performance of an organization and its vendors. Much like scores in the credit ratings industry, Bitsight Security Ratings are generated through the analysis of externally observable data. Bitsight continuously gathers and analyzes massive amounts of security data from hundreds of sources to look for evidence of compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. Ratings are generated daily, providing a near real-time assessment of a vendor’s security posture.

Supporting The Cyber Security Risk Management Process

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides capabilities that let you:

• Increase operational efficiency. Bitsight provides tools to help summarize and communicate the risk associated with each vendor relationship. By locate specific points of risk across your entire vendor pool without having to wait for vendor communication of risk or exposure, Bitsight streamlines the task of measuring risk for hundreds or thousands of vendors.
• Enhance portfolio performance. Bitsight provides insight-at-a-glance into risk levels across your entire third-party vendor portfolio. With a clear picture of cyber risk aligned to your organization’s risk tolerance, you can make confident, data-driven decisions about your cyber security plan and prioritize resources to drive more efficient risk reduction.
• Accelerate onboarding. With Bitsight, you can reduce the time and cost required to onboard vendors. You can also make your cyber security risk management efforts more scalable by using workflow integration, smart tiering recommendations, and risk vector breakdowns to identify areas of known risk.
• Customize reassessments. Bitsight makes it easy to reassess vendors based on their tier and performance, rather than using a standard template or auditing cycle. With Bitsight Security Ratings, you can tailor your reassessment program to reduce cost, minimize time, and allocate resources to areas where they are needed most.
• Continuously monitor performance. Bitsight provides near real-time updates on changes to vendor security posture and risk vector grades, and alerts vendor risk managers when something is noticed on their network.
• Manage incidents effectively. When a vendor experiences an incident, Bitsight can send alerts both to you and the vendor to remediate security issues faster and more efficiently.

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 A Cyber Security Risk Management Process?

The impact of cyber events on reputational risk management

A cybersecurity incident can harm an organization in many ways – from interrupting operations to exposing intellectual property to the financial impact of remediation. But companies can't forget the damage caused by an attack or breach may be the harm to a business’s reputation, which can lead to losses at multiple levels. Companies suffering a breach may lose customers and prospective customers. Shareholders may abandon the company, driving down the stock price. And with the rapid spread of information through social media and negative media coverage, a damaged brand may ultimately lead to significant losses in revenue and profitability.

Clearly, reputational risk management must be a top priority for risk teams, leadership, and boards of directors. In cybersecurity, companies can best manage reputational risk through continuous monitoring programs. By constantly evaluating the organization’s security performance and the security posture of its third-party vendors, continuous monitoring can help mitigate risk while maintaining legal, regulatory, and fiduciary responsibilities.

As a company dedicated to providing trusted data and insights for managing cyber risk, Bitsight delivers industry-leading solutions that support continuous monitoring to enhance reputational risk management.

The benefits of continuous monitoring for managing reputational risk

While continuous monitoring solutions help mitigate the risk of cyberattacks, these technologies can also have a positive impact on an organization’s reputation in several ways.

Protection of shareholder value

Cybersecurity incidents often result in lost revenue from existing clients, a poorer win rate for new business, and a drop in share price. Preventing breaches through ongoing cybersecurity monitoring practices is critical to protecting shareholder value.

Protection of company value

For companies that are going public or being acquired, a robust cyber risk management program can drive up the value of the business. Conversely, companies that lack robust security programs – or worse, that suffer breaches – will likely lose opportunities and business value.

Competitive differentiation

Cybersecurity incidents raise doubt in the minds of potential customers about a company’s ability to keep confidential information safe. Companies that can avoid incidents through continuous monitoring will inevitably enjoy a competitive advantage.

Reduced third-party risk

Any outside organization presents a risk. Cybersecurity incidents in third-party organizations like partners, suppliers, and vendors can impact an organization’s reputation. Even more dangerous are threats that breach a company’s defenses by targeting a third-party vendor with a weak security posture. Continuous monitoring enables security teams to identify risk within third-party ecosystems and make data-driven decisions about ways to mitigate it.

Reputational risk management solutions from Bitsight

Bitsight created the world’s first cybersecurity rating in 2011 and has pioneered the industry ever since. Today, Bitsight is trusted by leading organizations worldwide as an invaluable partner in managing cyber risk and achieving digital resilience.

Bitsight offers a range of solutions that enable continuous monitoring of an organization’s security performance and the security posture of vendors and third-party relationships.

Bitsight for Security Performance Management

Bitsight enhances reputational risk management by enabling organizations to continually assess security controls and remediate gaps. With Bitsight, risk management teams can prioritize work and investments to improve security controls and maintain continuous visibility of the extended digital footprint.

Bitsight for Third Party Risk Management

Bitsight measures and continuously monitors third-party security controls to align risk tolerance with organizational objectives. Third-party risk management teams can perform vendor due diligence by continuously monitoring risk within third-party ecosystems and validating security controls across new and existing vendors. Bitsight’s vendor risk monitoring solutions enable organizations to manage constantly changing risk levels throughout the vendor lifecycle and collaborate with vendors to address areas of risk.

Bitsight for Fourth-Party Risk Management

Bitsight helps teams automatically identify vendor connections with other potentially risky fourth parties and validates security controls across the extended vendor portfolio. Automatic alerts identify security incidents within the extended vendor supply chain. Bitsight also delivers visibility into the concentration of risk-related service providers and technologies.

Bitsight for Vendor Risk Management

Bitsight Vendor Risk Management augments the third-party risk management process by helping to manage vendor risk throughout the entire vendor relationship. Third-party risk management teams can combine workflow automation with objective data when evaluating third-party vendors. This enhances reputational risk management while matching organizational and cybersecurity requirements.

How Bitsight Security Ratings impact reputational risk management

Bitsight Security Ratings can be a helpful reputational risk management tool, providing visibility into the security posture of organizations and their supply chains through the analysis of externally observable data. Produced daily, Bitsight ratings help organizations proactively identify, quantify, and manage cybersecurity risk throughout their ecosystem.

Unlike traditional cyber security analysis tools that review a company’s policies or conduct periodic scans, Bitsight Security Ratings continuously measure security performance based on data in four areas: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and public disclosures of breach. This data-driven, outside-in approach provides a clear picture of cyber risk for any organization – without requiring information from the rated entity.

The higher the Bitsight rating, the more effective the organization’s security programs and controls. In addition to reviewing daily ratings, organizations can observe historical trends and drill down into the data on which ratings are based to understand where risk exists and how best to remediate it.

Why companies 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.

Why a cyber risk strategy is more critical than ever

While cybersecurity spending has increased annually, so has the proliferation and sophistication of cyber-attacks . The cost of these security incidents is increasing as well. Governments have responded with a growing body of regulation meant to protect consumer data and strengthen organizational defenses. As a result, many organizations find themselves investing even more heavily in solutions to protect their IT environments and ensure compliance.

Clearly, a sophisticated cyber risk strategy is essential to protect organizations from evolving threats while also enabling compliance with cyber security regulations. The right strategy must not only provide a more secure business environment, but it must also deliver the transparency that regulators and corporate boards will require from security programs. A trusted strategy will bring cyber risk in line with all the other pressing business risks, instead of overusing business resources.

Bitsight Security Performance Management enables security and risk leaders to take a risk-based, outcome-driven approach cybersecurity performance management. Through broad measurement, continuous monitoring, and detailed planning and forecasting, Bitsight supports security and risk teams as they develop a cyber risk strategy to measure and reduce risk through effective security controls.

Four guidelines for a sound cyber risk strategy

Successful cybersecurity programs require a fundamental paradigm shift when considering cyber risk strategies. Previously, strategies were centered around minimizing vulnerabilities and exposure. Cyber risk strategies today must be based on achieving specific outcomes and daily risk reduction – small, incremental improvements that enable teams to make larger proactive decisions as programs evolve.

An effective strategy will be governed by four guidelines.

• Sound program governance. Effective governance defines the policies and procedures that your company relies on to defend against cyber events and threats. Sound governance requires IT spending to be accurately mapped to business outcomes in order to evaluate the effectiveness of controls and security systems.
• Continuous monitoring. The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and risk detection and remediation efforts must evolve as well. Traditionally, evaluation of the effectiveness of security programs relied on periodic assessments. Today, a superior cyber risk strategy requires continuous monitoring of risk and the security programs designed to mitigate it.
• Daily assessment of priorities. Managing the integrity of your cybersecurity programs requires constant prioritization. Your ability to achieve and maintain internal performance standards and comply with external regulations requires that you assess your fundamentals on a day-to-day basis, actively managing your investments and resource allocations to address the most significant concerns, and adopting new technology or procedures as you can.
• Effective reporting. Building a mature security organization requires an effective reporting process with clearly defined and meaningful metrics. The ability to communicate in business terms – rather than with deeply technical terminology – will increase the confidence of board members and senior leadership while providing the KPIs and context required to enable better decision-making around investments in your cyber risk strategy.

Managing your cyber risk strategy with Bitsight

Bitsight Security Performance Management (SPM) provides businesses with the tools to develop a superior cyber risk strategy. Built on Bitsight’s industry-leading cybersecurity and data analytics, SPM facilitates organizational cyber risk oversight by delivering continuous visibility of the extended digital footprint and a differentiated view of the organization’s unique hierarchical structure.

Bitsight SPM delivers all the capabilities and security analytics that security and risk leaders need to develop and execute an effective cyber risk strategy.

Increased visibility

SPM enables evidence-based cyber risk monitoring that allows leaders to define performance standards for their organization and prioritize the work required to achieve them. Leveraging meaningful metrics and security ratings that are independently verified to correlate to breach risk, SPM provides the ability to view performance over time and guide the organization in efforts to reduce risk and achieve business outcomes.

Improved governance

Bitsight SPM helps to drive accountability across the organization based on uniform performance targets. Security leaders can develop performance targets based on the performance of customized peer groups and financially quantify cyber risk to set measurable exposure thresholds.

Enhanced management

To achieve performance targets, security teams can use Bitsight SPM to monitor performance cybersecurity controls throughout the organization, evaluate their effectiveness based on a best practices framework, and suggest actions to remediate any cybersecurity gaps. Security leaders can prioritize improvements to controls based on the impact on risk reduction. Bitsight’s Ratings Tree uniquely represents an organization’s unique hierarchical structure – including business units, subsidiaries, and geographical locations – to show how one entity is performing individually but also how it factors into overall company performance.

Effective assurance

Bitsight SPM enables security leaders to effectively communicate the performance of cybersecurity programs to the Board of Directors and other key stakeholders. Bitsight data analytics & cybersecurity reporting tools make it easy to compare security performance with customized peer groups, and to communicate the effectiveness of controls for each business unit.

Bitsight benefits for managing a cyber risk strategy

With Bitsight Security Performance Management, security and risk teams can:

• Drive accountability across the organization based on uniform performance targets.
• Deliver a financial analysis of cyber risk exposure with a turnkey solution.
• Improve the security performance of parent companies through analysis of each business unit.
• Continuously measure the effectiveness of security controls.
• Leverage prescriptive analytics and an asset risk matrix to prioritize allocation decisions.
• Inspire confidence in security programs by effectively communicating analytics and improvements to executives and board members.
• Quickly export an executive summary of program performance over time.
• Use meaningful metrics that can be understood by technical and non-technical stakeholders alike to create a shared understanding of cyber risk standards and performance.
• Easily compare the results of a cyber risk strategy to other top-performing organizations.

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.