What is a cyber security risk assessment matrix?
A cyber security risk assessment matrix is a tool that provides a graphical depiction of areas of risk within an organization’s digital ecosystem or vendor network. A risk matrix can help define and categorize various risks that face the organization according to the importance of an asset and the severity of the risk associated with it.
What is the benefit of a cyber security risk assessment matrix?
A risk matrix can help organizations prioritize remediation of risk based on severity. It can also help prioritize which vendors should be more rigorously assessed based on their importance to the organization and the severity of the risk they represent.
What is a cybersecurity risk assessment checklist?
A cyber security risk assessment checklist is a set of information, questions and tasks that risk managers can use to perform due diligence during the vendor selection process. Checklists may include information to be obtained from the vendor through a risk assessment questionnaire, for example, as well as data to be obtained independently from other sources. Risk assessment checklists are designed to provide a clear picture of the risk posed to the organization by prospective vendors.
Prioritize Efforts With A Cyber Security Risk Assessment Matrix
As cyber threats continue to become more sophisticated and dangerous, third-party risk managers must find ways to maximize the impact of their limited risk management budgets. They are also under greater pressure to communicate the success of investments in cyber risk management to executive leadership and the board.
A cyber security risk assessment matrix can be a vital tool in accomplishing both objectives. By categorizing risks based on the importance of assets/vendors and the severity of the risk they pose to the organization, risk managers can get a clear sense of the areas of highest concentrated risk, enabling them to prioritize resources for remediation. Using a risk matrix in the boardroom provides a powerful and graphic representation of which areas of risk should be highest priority for the organization as a whole, while also suggesting how to mitigate third party risk most effectively. This helps piece together the most important areas of your cybersecurity program so stakeholders don’t have to analyze overwhelming amounts of cybersecurity information.
As a leading provider of solutions for managing and mitigating risk, Bitsight offers a cyber security risk assessment matrix that provides AI-driven risk prioritization to deliver greater insight into risk and strategies for remediation.
How A Cyber Security Risk Assessment Matrix Works
A cyber security risk assessment matrix can be configured to represent risk in a variety of ways.
Before building a risk assessment matrix, security leaders must undertake a security risk assessment to identify the risks facing the organization, severity of those risks, and the importance of the assets or the vendors with which those risks are associated. Data from an information technology risk assessment can then help security leaders to tier digital endpoints and third-party vendors into various categories.
Color-coding the categories of a cyber security risk assessment matrix when presenting data to business stakeholders or executives can help to make an immediate visual impact. For example, the category of non-critical assets that represent little risk can be colored green, as the potential adverse consequences of risk in this area is fairly light. Conversely, critical assets where the associated risk is severe may be colored red to indicate that this area should be prioritized for remediation.
Measuring Risk With Bitsight
As a leading provider of Security Rating Services, Bitsight provides advanced capabilities for measuring risk and monitoring the security performance of organizations and their vendors.
Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides automated tools that continuously measure and monitor the security posture of vendors. This Bitsight solution easily exposes cyber risk within the supply chain, helping organizations to focus their resources and to work with vendors to achieve measurable risk reduction.
Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management includes a cyber security risk assessment matrix designed to help organizations assess, prioritize, and manage third-party risk more rapidly. Bitsight’s Portfolio Risk Matrix allows security leaders to perform critical risk analysis and prioritize remediation efforts across their third-party ecosystem. Using customizable, risk-based tiering configurations, risk leaders can get a clear picture of the state of risk based on business criticality and cybersecurity performance of their vendors. These findings can be presented in a cyber security risk assessment report to help senior leadership and board members better understand the risks facing the organization, enabling them to prioritize investment in the staff and resources required for remediation.
An AI-Driven Asset Risk Matrix
Bitsight’s cyber security risk assessment matrix also includes an asset risk matrix that is the industry’s first AI-driven asset prioritization tool. Powered by Bitsight’s advanced data collection and data science capabilities, this intelligent and configurable matrix factors a broad range of items into its prioritization schema, including measured system usage, user information submission, existence of specialized certificates, and other contributing factors that indicate criticality of assets.
By enabling rapid assessment of asset criticality and severity of issues affecting assets, Bitsight helps organizations understand the most pressing issues facing their vendors and allows them to prioritize remediation efforts to mitigate risk. Bitsight also provides rated vendors with contextual insights about the risks living on their network so they can drive action toward remediation.
Why Choose Bitsight?
Bitsight has pioneered the security ratings industry since its founding in 2011. Providing a dynamic measurement of cybersecurity posture, Bitsight enables organizations to improve their own security performance and manage risk more effectively throughout their vendor ecosystem.
Bitsight Security Ratings are based on objective, externally verifiable data on metrics such as compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Collecting data from 120+ sources on 25 risk vectors, Bitsight generates daily ratings for hundreds of thousands of organizations. By enabling more complete security visibility and evaluating how well an organization is protected against cybersecurity threats, Bitsight helps security leaders to make faster, more strategic decisions about risk management and cybersecurity policy.
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