If you’re involved in IT risk or cybersecurity, you’ve probably encountered BitSight Technologies. It is one of a wave of promised solutions to the growing problem of managing third-party risk posed by your IT vendors in the cloud.
In the past, third-party risk management and vendor risk management was solved with a combination of spreadsheet-based vendor assessments, sporadic penetration testing and vulnerability scans. If you combine this with subjective measurement and scoring of risk, you are probably taking on a lot more cybersecurity risk than you should be.
BitSight promises to translate the technical complexity of cyber security exposure into a single BitSight security rating, a score akin to a credit score you can take to management and the board. You can also use cyber security ratings for pricing cyber insurance policies, due diligence for M&A and risk analytics.
This sounds great. A measurable, repeatable approach to managing cyber risk. But before you commit, you should consider other SaaS solutions like SecurityScorecard, a New York based company or UpGuard. See our article on the difference between BitSight and SecurityScorecard.
UpGuard does what BitSight does but better with real-time threat intelligence and additional capabilities to deal with other cyber threats like malware and your IT infrastructure.
About UpGuard
UpGuard was founded in 2012 by technologists from some of Australia's largest financial service companies. Using their first-hand experience, they built a platform to reduce the risk of security incidents.
With proprietary, patented data visualization and risk analysis algorithms, UpGuard gives operations and security departments the ability to discover and understand their digital surfaces, network security and digital supply chain to reduce their cybersecurity risk.
Now, those capabilities have been turned outward to the public internet to capture the digital surfaces beyond the boundaries of the enterprise such as cloud storage solutions. UpGuard is headquartered in Mountain View, California with offices in Sydney, Australia. UpGuard also works with insurance companies and underwriters as part of their cyber insurance process.
Unlike our competitors, we have clear transparent pricing so you can make a decision quickly.
Prevent Data Breaches and Data Leaks
The real power of UpGuard is preventing data breaches. Data breaches and data leaks are the most significant risk to your business. A breach in customer data has the power to damage your business severely. Just ask, Equifax, Yahoo or one of the other victims of the biggest data breaches.
UpGuard BreachSight is the only solution that continuously scans for and discovers data exposures related to all parts of your business. Prevent reputational and regulatory harm by securing leaked data before it falls into the wrong hands.
We'll alert you when employee login credentials are compromised or stolen. We scan thousands of known breaches for personally identifiable information (PII). In fact, our data breach research has been featured in the New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Forbes and Techcrunch.
With over 3 million data breaches found we believe this is an epidemic. Your critical metric should be ‘breaches prevented’, not ‘issues found’.
Understand Each Vendor's Cybersecurity Posture
Along with security questionnaires, UpGuard VendorRisk can help you find, monitor and track your vendors' security performance over time with our instant vendor search. We'll also benchmark their performance against their industry so you can keep your vendors accountable. We'll rate your vendor's security against 50+ criteria and give them a Cyber Security Rating that is calculated daily, with the option to instantly refresh their security posture in real-time.
In fact, we'll even monitor the vendors of your vendors to help you manage fourth-party risk.
Other products like BitSight also score vendors. However, they take days to score a new vendor versus UpGuard's accurate and instant scoring.
Automate Security Questionnaires
Security questionnaires are an essential part of your vendor risk management program and can uncover issues relating to the vendor's information security policy and procedures that lead to security risks. UpGuard VendorRisk can help you get deeper insights with questionnaires and scale your security team by helping you create, send and monitor security questionnaires automatically.
BitSight does not help you manage security questionnaires.
Can’t decide? Think About the Problem You are Trying to Solve
There are lots of products out there with various features and differences between them. BitSight, SecurityScorecard and UpGuard are all capable. But you won't yet find a silver bullet solution that covers all aspects of managing IT vendor risk.
It may be helpful to ask yourself what problem you are really trying to solve. We at UpGuard have a different view to our peers. We give you the ability to find and close data breaches before they hurt your business and your customers.
