An important part of your security processes involves assessing the effectiveness of your organisation’s policies and tools to make sure you’re staying ahead of the curve.
To gain insight into your cybersecurity performance, you need clear, continuous, and actionable metrics that you can track over time and compare against your peers and competitors.
Comparing and quantifying your cybersecurity posture against peers, in this manner, provides valuable context into how your cybersecurity programmes are performing, relative to others in your industry.
Peer comparisons of cyber risk ratings also provide actionable and detailed intelligence that help your team gain a valuable perspective on the effectiveness of your defensive mechanisms.
By establishing benchmarks like cyber risk ratings, there’s plenty of opportunities to improve your cybersecurity programmes. In this post, let’s explore how peer comparisons can support your firm’s cyber assessment capabilities.
Discover industry standards for security performance
Businesses need to know and meet their industry’s security performance standards if they are keen on winning over new clients and remaining competitive in their respective markets.
In this regard, peer comparison of cyber risk ratings helps you discover cybersecurity performance standards that exist in your respective industry, sector, and peer group.
Identify performance gaps
Cyber ratings have been designed to overcome the shortfalls of other benchmark tools. In fact, these ratings complement other solutions that support your cybersecurity posture like third-party assessments, compliance, and penetration testing.
When it comes to cyber risk ratings, peer analytics help organisations uncover factors that affect their security performance standards and pinpoint the biggest discrepancies between their practices and their peers.
Set security performance targets
Peer analytics help security leaders observe and compare their organisation to industry benchmarks or even specific peer groups. This helps you set up security performance targets that are relevant to you and those that are valuable to the partners and clients/customers you work with.
Using peer comparisons for risk ratings, you’re able to set targets at the overall security rating level, at the individual risk level, and even at specific event levels.
Allocate company resources effectively
Cybersecurity is an expensive exercise for any organisation, regardless of its size or what industry it operates in. Security ratings are useful, here, because they help you understand if you’re investing in the right tools and resources to detect and mitigate cyber threats effectively.
Peer analytics of security risk ratings help you distribute your resources more efficiently and focus security spending on creating the biggest impact on security performance.
Commit to cybersecurity improvements
With the insights you gain from cybersecurity risk ratings, you can model different scenarios and remediation paths to project future security performance.
With peer analytics of risk ratings, you’re able to see where you’re falling short of industry standards and discover opportunities for improvements to conform to these benchmarks successfully.
Guarantee more accurate security reporting
Leveraging peer analytics, security and risk leaders can report on critical company-wide metrics in a more objective and verifiable manner.
These types of reports will not only notify senior executives and corporate directors, internally, but also provide a telling signal to customers and regulators. This will position your company’s cybersecurity programme as aligned with best practices and industry standards.
Perform peer- and sector-wide security benchmarking with risk ratings
Traditional approaches to cyber assessment only provide limited analysis of security performance, with no insight into industry-wide standards for a comprehensive, real-time comparative assessment.
This is clear from the continuous legal liabilities organisations face for failing to meet customer requirements and industry-wide cybersecurity standards.
With peer comparisons of risk ratings, however, you gain unprecedented visibility at the most granular level to help you make more data-driven decisions.
Get in touch with RiskXchange to integrate AI-assisted and centralised 360-degree security ratings to your organisation’s cybersecurity programme. Stay ahead of emerging threats and manage your enterprise and supply chain security risks with peer comparisons of risk ratings.
RiskXchange is a company founded and led by recognised experts in the security industry, who have held leading roles in companies like IBM Security.
