Cybersecurity Ratings | Vendor Risk Management

What Are Security Ratings?

Security ratings are measurements that provide an assessment of an organization's cybersecurity risk and performance. Security ratings are designed to give businesses, insurers, and other interested parties a quantifiable, objective measure of how well a company is managing its cybersecurity risks. Similar to credit scores, a security rating measures a company's vendor security.

GSI sets the foundation for these risk-based conversations, ensuring a stronger security posture.

How Are Security Ratings Calculated?

These ratings are objective indicators, which means how they're calculated depends on the company and the risk posed. The lower the rating, the lower the security of an organization. The higher the score, the better vendor security your organization has.

Security ratings are generated by collecting and analyzing a range of data, including publicly available information, network behavior, breach history, and known vulnerabilities. This data is processed using proprietary algorithms to assess risks and produce a rating, typically represented as a numerical score or letter grade. These ratings provide insights into an organization's cybersecurity posture by focusing on externally observable factors, but they have limitations, such as not fully capturing internal security practices. While useful, they should be integrated into a broader cybersecurity risk management strategy and not relied upon as the sole indicator of security health.

Why Use Security Ratings?

Security ratings are becoming increasingly essential for organizations as they provide an objective assessment of risk, assist in managing third-party risks, and enable benchmarking of cybersecurity performance. These ratings play a vital role in various areas, including cyber insurance underwriting, due diligence for mergers and acquisitions, and regulatory compliance. By offering a quantifiable measurement of an organization's cybersecurity posture, these ratings help prioritize resource allocation, strengthen trust and reputation, and facilitate proactive security management. While they provide valuable insights, it is crucial to integrate them into a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, recognizing their limitations and supplementing them with other security assessment tools in the ecosystem.

What Is Vendor Risk Management?

Vendor Risk Management (VRM) is a comprehensive strategy that identifies, evaluates, and mitigates potential risks associated with external vendors and suppliers who have access to an organization's systems, data, or resources. This proactive approach involves conducting thorough assessments before partnering with vendors, consistently monitoring their adherence to security standards, and nurturing the ongoing relationship to ensure their practices align with the organization's risk tolerance and regulatory requirements. In today's interconnected business landscape, VRM is of utmost importance as a data breach or compliance failure within a vendor's systems can have severe legal, financial, and reputational consequences for the hiring organization. By implementing effective VRM practices, organizations can minimize these risks by ensuring that vendors uphold robust cybersecurity and operational standards.

What are Vendor Risk Management Ratings?

Vendor Risk Management (VRM) ratings from VRM tools are specialized evaluations that quantify and categorize the risk levels associated with third-party vendors, primarily focusing on cybersecurity, compliance, and operational risks. These tools gather and analyze data on various aspects of a vendor's business, including their security posture, adherence to regulatory standards, financial health, and historical performance. By processing this information through proprietary algorithms, VRM tools generate a rating or score that reflects the potential risk a vendor may pose to an organization. These ratings are instrumental for businesses in making informed decisions about which vendors to engage with, negotiating contracts, and continuously monitoring and managing the risks associated with existing vendor relationships, ensuring that they align with the organization's overall risk management strategy and compliance requirements.

Why Use Vendor Risk Management Tools?

Vendor Risk Management (VRM) ratings quantify and categorize the risk levels associated with third-party vendors, focusing on cybersecurity, compliance, and operational risks. These ratings help businesses make informed decisions about vendors, negotiate contracts, and manage risks. By analyzing data on security posture, regulatory adherence, financial health, and performance, VRM tools generate ratings that reflect potential risks to an organization. These ratings align with risk management strategies and compliance requirements, ensuring effective vendor relationship management.

Security Performance Management

BitSsght Security Performance Management (SPM) provides chief information security officers (CISOs) with powerful analytics to effectively address cyber risk governance and exposure management while confidently demonstrating program performance.

Risk leaders rely on SPM to:

Safeguard their business partners from threats
Achieve consistent performance
Make informed decisions using a complete view of all security vectors
Assure stakeholders of program effectiveness
Manage external attack surfaces
Enhance governance and analytics
Quantify cyber risk
Enact remediation efforts and strategies following a vendor risk assessment

Exposure Management

Manage the expanding landscape of potential cyber-attacks. While your attack surface may be increasing, your cyber risk doesn't have to. Stay ahead of the game by proactively addressing vulnerabilities and resolving immediate issues, ensuring that only the individuals you authorize have access to your valuable data. Gain a deep understanding of your most susceptible areas and take action to mitigate them.

Exposure management also improves your security posture by directing your efforts towards a stronger defense and enhanced security. You can focus on specific activities tailored to your unique needs to fortify your cybersecurity measures and reduce the likelihood of successful attacks.

Performance Management

Gain insights into the effectiveness of your operations and enhance areas that require improvement. No longer rely on superficial metrics. Dive deep into your performance using governance analytics. Set measurable targets, align them with desired outcomes, and track progress over time to enhance your performance continually.

Understand your performance levels and the reasons behind them. Achieve consistent performance across your entire organization. Monitor and evaluate your performance trends to ensure continuous growth and success.

Risk Assessment

Make informed decisions about your cyber risk. Understand how to effectively manage your cyber risk by choosing to accept, mitigate, or transfer it. Assess your financial exposure to cyber risk to ensure you make the right choices based on your current situation.

Customize your cyber insurance to match your risk appetite.

Share Data Risks with Board Members or Executive Leaders

GSI's security ratings allow you to create reports and share them with decision-makers, vendors, or other third parties. This gives everyone involved in the short and long-term efforts of the business a comprehensive overview of all present and possible cyber risks.

Security ratings provide recommendations that can help you manage risk, implement a new security program, and improve your overall risk rating. You can use this information to communicate cybersecurity in a language that resonates with the board. Allocate resources to what truly matters, prioritizing the areas that require the most attention.

Vendor Risk Management

Gain complete control over your risks throughout your digital supply chain. With Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management, empower your leaders to effectively manage every aspect of your digital ecosystem. Streamline vendor assessments, proactively monitor for hidden vulnerabilities, and take decisive action to mitigate exposure. Move swiftly and confidently in protecting your organization from potential threats.

Bitsight's Vendor Risk Management tool assesses and monitors cybersecurity risks associated with third-party vendors. It uses various data sources to generate security ratings for each vendor, enabling organizations to make informed decisions about vendor selection and prioritize risk mitigation efforts. The tool offers continuous monitoring and alerts organizations to changes in a vendor's risk profile in real-time, facilitating proactive management of potential security issues and reducing overall risk exposure in the supply chain.

How Can You Use Security Ratings in Your Risk Management?

Security ratings are best used as part of a monitoring program. These security ratings make it easier to determine the level of threat involved for your company as well las when working with specific third-party vendors. An organization's security rating helps organizations choose more trustworthy business partners, lowering the company's overall rating.

Companies can also use the Bitsight Security Ratings platform to measure their cyber risk appetite. This refers to the level of vendor security required for an organization. Some companies may be willing to accept a higher degree of risk for third parties than others.

Using this Risk Management Program Datasheet, you can improve your organization's cybersecurity posture.

Challenge

Difficult to understand and quantify an organization's cybersecurity risks.

Solution

Bitsight's rating provides organizations with a standardized and objective measurement of their cybersecurity risk posture. This empowers organizations to make informed decisions by evaluating their vulnerability to risks, prioritizing efforts to fix vulnerabilities, and effectively allocating resources.

Challenge

Need reliable, independent data for cyber insurance underwriting.

Solution

Using Bitsight ratings, organizations can mitigate risks and reduce insurance premiums. Bitsight provides insurers with a comprehensive understanding of an organization's cybersecurity stance, enabling precise underwriting decisions, accurate policy pricing, and effective management of risk.

Challenges

Working with numerous suppliers, vendors, and partners within an intricate supply chain exposes one to possible security vulnerabilities.

Solution

Bitsight evaluates and tracks the cybersecurity stance of third-party entities, delivering uninterrupted monitoring and evaluation of vendors' security effectiveness to detect and reduce supply chain vulnerabilities.

Challenge

Monitoring and ensuring compliance with various industry ratings and standards.

Solution

Bitsight helps organizations monitor compliance with industry regulations and standards, providing insights into non-compliance areas and identifying gaps that need immediate attention for ongoing compliance.

Challenge

Need to benchmark against industry peers as well as competitors.

Solution

Bitsight enables organizations to benchmark their security ratings and performance against industry peers, improving goal setting and performance tracking.

Certified CISO & vCISO Resources

GSI has certified Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) resources.

Certified ISO 27001 Lead Implementer

Certified ISO 27001 Lead Implementer resources on staff. GSI is certified to implement the formal structure, governance, and policy of an ISO 27001 conforming to the Information Security Management System (ISMS) standards.

AICPA SOC 2 Certified

GSI is SOC 2 certified by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) which demonstrates that GSI has specific security controls in place.

Application Expertise

Industry-leading enterprise application experts with an average of 18+ years of application, security, industry, cloud, business, and managed services experience. We prioritize security control effectiveness by offering you a complete overview of your security posture and of all vendors.

Sub-5-minute Response Time

Average sub-5-minute response time to tickets and alerts. Immediate response times can be critical when dealing with critical infrastructure security practices.

100% Signature Guarantee

All Services are backed by GSI’s Signature 100% Guarantee. Continuous visibility and effective dynamic measurement of your cybersecurity posture and vendor relationships are the best ways to minimize risk.