Cybersecurity Benchmarking and Security Performance Management: A No-Guesswork Approach for CIOs

CIOs, CISOs, and other security and risk leaders are expected to know the answers to a few simple questions:

• How secure is an organization?
• Are we improving over time?
• Are our investments in cybersecurity paying off?
• Are we more or less secure than others in our industry?

But as every cybersecurity professional knows, these questions aren’t as simple as they seem. cybersecurity’s big secret — and the biggest source of anxiety for CIOs — is that it’s hard to tell what actually works. Audits, assessments, software tools, and “best practices” each involve a certain amount of guesswork and finger crossing. And as far as peers and competitors are concerned, who’s to say how you compare? Legacy benchmarking methods are time-consuming and don’t always produce accurate data.

But the Board and other executives aren’t going to stop asking these questions. They need to know the state of the organization’s cybersecurity, and they expect that information to be communicated in a way that’s easy for them to understand.

So the CIO is forced to make assumptions, guesses, and judgement calls, informally synthesizing what they know about their team’s performance. Otherwise, they have to spend valuable time aggregating complex metrics in an effort to quantify cyber risk, only to have the results become outdated almost immediately.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how you can use Bitsight Security Ratings:

• As a New Approach
• For Security Performance Management
• For Benchmarking
• As Data-driven Way of Reporting