What metrics do you need to consider when assessing your cyber risk with a cybersecurity risk rating solution?
Businesses are transforming their supply chain processes by shifting their processes online. Digitising the supply chain has allowed companies to operate during a volatile time. Despite the benefits, this development has raised concerns about cyber risk.
Supply chain cyber attacks are expected to quadruple by the end of 2021 and if businesses wish to secure their data they will need to invest in cybersecurity risk rating solutions.
Cybersecurity rating platforms can improve vendor security by monitoring vendor activity more closely than before and is the ideal solution for monitoring vendor activity.
The challenge in maintaining vendor security
Many IT teams have trouble convincing business users of the importance of vendor risk management because they have trouble gathering evidence and presenting it in a way that is compelling to business users. This leads to a schism between business and IT teams on the importance of vendor security.
What is even more concerning is that business leaders are not aware of its importance and how this might hurt their business in the long run.
To work around these problems and ensure that the supply chain does not come under attack, businesses need to ensure they are following the right metrics.
Why does selecting the right metrics for Cybersecurity Risk Rating matter?
Tracking the right KPIs is a crucial practice because it helps you improve vendor security practices. Without tracking specific metrics, it is impossible to understand how effective vendor security efforts are or if standards have declined over time. Without tracking the right type of metrics, making progress in vendor security is a difficult task.
Tracking vendor security also allows organisations to resolve one of their greatest issues—communication with business stakeholders. Excellent cybersecurity metrics can convey the proper state of vendor security to those who do not have a technical background. They can make a direct connection between vendor security information and ROI, profitability, and operating costs—a crucial factor for mobilising a company into improving vendor security.
But to reap these benefits, following the right metrics is critical.
Key cyber risk metrics to follow
Following the right metrics can ensure that businesses are creating a more secure vendor infrastructure.
Security ratings: Vendor security is graded from A-F after assessing several factors such as DNS, patching cadence, leaked credentials, social engineering, and cubit score.
Level of preparedness: The metric will measure how many devices are on the network and are fully patched and up to date.
Intrusion attempts: This metric will assess how many times bad actors have tried to breach the network.
Mean time to acknowledge: What is the average time it takes you to begin addressing an issue once you get the alert?
Mean time to detect: How long do security threats fly under the radar of your organisation?
Mean time between failures: How reliable is the product or platform in use?
Days to patch: The length of time taken to implement security patches; the lag between patch releases and implementation is often exploited by hackers.
Mean time to recovery (MTTR): How long does it take to recover from an attack?
Mean time to contain: How long does it take to contain identified attack vectors?
The number of cybersecurity incidents reported: Are there any other issues reported?
Non-human traffic (NHT): The metric measures the amount of non-human traffic triggered by bots.
Following these metrics can help augment vendor security procedures to improve data security.
Improve vendor security with RiskXchange
As businesses digitise the supply chain, finding ways to mitigate third-party breaches to protect data and meet compliance requirements is crucial.
To meet the growing challenges of vendor security, businesses need to be smarter and more efficient about their vendor security procedures. To get smarter about vendor security practices, they need to place greater emphasis on their vendor security procedures.
The key to getting smarter about vendor security practices is to ensure that metrics properly reflect the current status of vendor security, making it easier to improve vendor security and create a more secure security environment.
