The unfortunate truth is outsourcing to third-parties introduces significant cyber risk. The news is inundated with third-party data breaches and data leaks.
With the average cost of a data breach at nearly $4 million globally, it makes sense to invest in tools to prevent data breaches.
This is why cybersecurity vendor risk management (VRM) has become a top priority for CISOs and other members of senior management, even at the Board level. In addition to financial costs, there are increased regulatory and reputational costs.
Governments are enacting laws and regulations designed to promote, or require, third-party cyber risk management programs to identify, assess, mitigate and oversee risks created by vendors, fourth-parties, and customers.
While this isn't new for financial services or healthcare industries, the introduction of general data protection laws has dramatically increased the demand and need for vendor risk management best practices.
For example in the United States California has introduced CCPA and Florida has introduced FIPA to protect the personally identifiable information of their constituents. Outside of the United States, GDPR, LGPD, and PIPEDA are three important extraterritorial laws from the European Union, Brazil, and Canada respectively. Alongside the protection of PII and PHI, many of these laws have introduced mandatory data breach notification requirements which have greatly increased the reputational impact of inadequate vendor and cybersecurity risk management practices.
To add to this, security teams have more expected to not only manage and improve security postures and information security policies, but to translate technical details from cybersecurity risk assessments and vendor questionnaires into terms that non-technical stakeholders can understand.
The good news is third-party risk management tools can help you do exactly that. The issue is it's hard to decide on which ones to assess, let alone what criteria to assess them against.
That's why we wrote this post to provide you with a clear comparison between BitSight, Prevalent, and UpGuard, so you can make an informed decision and choose the tool that is right for you.
BitSight Technologies overview
BitSight Technologies is a Cambridge-based company that aims to quantify the external cybersecurity posture of organizations using publicly accessible data. Its FICO-like BitSight security rating is used by underwriters at insurance companies for pricing cyber insurance, 3rd party research for third-party risk teams, and due diligence research for private equity and M&A activities, and more.
Additionally, security ratings can be used for security performance management and the assessment of third and fourth-party risk.

Prevalent overview
Prevalent is a Phoenix-based company that enables you to reveal and reduce vendor risk with its 360-degree third-party risk management platform.
Prevalent's cybersecurity risk rating solution helps organizations manage and monitor the security threats and risks associated with third and fourth-party vendors.
Their tools can be used for third-party risk management, vendor risk management, data privacy, internal IT & cybersecurity assessment, and by vendors.
