BitSight vs RiskRecon Comparison

All three solutions provide security ratings, aggregated summaries of risk for immediate understanding and comparison, and their own standardize scoring methodology.

• BitSight: A credit score-like rating between 250-900.
• RiskRecon: RiskRecon distills its assessment criteria into a simple score from 0-10.
• UpGuard: Provides a score between 0 and 950 along with the following letter grades, A: 801-950, B: 601-800, C: 401-600, D: 201-400, F: 0-200. You can request your free security rating by clicking here.

Security rating calculation methodology

The way these security ratings are derived differ among the solutions to some degree. IP reputation relies on attributing malware traffic to an organization based on IP address, whereas scanning for misconfigurations means looking at an organization's actual Internet footprint and determining how it compares to best practices and what vulnerabilities lead to data breaches.

• BitSight: Primarily IP reputation, read our guide on why IP attribution isn't a complete solution here.
• RiskRecon: Assesses an organization against 11 security domains and 41 security criteria
• UpGuard: Runs hundreds of individual checks including email security and email spoofing risks (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), website security (SSL, HSTS, header exposure), phishing and malware risk, explicit checks for 200 services across thousands of ports (mail, app, user auth, file sharing, voice, administration, database, unidentified, and open ports), domain hijacking risk (DNSSEC and domain registry issues), reputational risks (CEO rating and employee rating), credential management (exposure to known data breaches and data leaks detected by our data leak detection engine) and results of intelligent security questionnaires.

Scope

Not every solution supports every vendor. Many organizations employ small specialist vendors that are not covered by solutions with a narrow scope of focus. Every vendor that handles sensitive data is a potential attack vector and should be continuously monitored for the risk they bring to your company.

• BitSight: 170,000 supported organizations
• RiskRecon: unknown
• UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily

Minimizing the amount of overhead required to acquire and use a solution is key to ensuring you get the most bang for your buck. All three solutions are SaaS services with minimal installation criteria. Similarly, all three use web interfaces to navigate graphical representations of cyber risk.

• BitSight: Provides high-level summation of vendor risk allowing easy comparison of vendors.
• RiskRecon: Provides risk prioritization based on your configured policy
• UpGuard: High-level summation of risk with the ability to drill down into precise technical details. Risks are automatically prioritized based on extensive research by our in-house security team and we provide remediation and protection suggestions for all risks. Additionally, we have a library of pre-built questionnaires that can be sent and managed with the UpGuard platform including a pandemic (e.g. coronavirus), ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CCPA, and Modern Slavery questionnaires. Read our full guide on the top security questionnaires here.

Making information publicly accessible can help customers and prospects reduce their operational overhead and provide them with the resources they need to troubleshoot, educate their staff, and make better decisions. How much each company invests in their community speaks to its mission and focus.

• BitSight: Company and product blog.
• RiskRecon: Company and product blog.
• UpGuard: The UpGuard cybersecurity and risk management blog is updated four times a week and our breach research blog has uncovered and secured some of the largest data breaches.

Technology is always changing and in turn, so is cybersecurity. The rate at which a company updates its software determines how well they can respond to customer requests and add new features, as well as how consistently it is improving its security ratings methodology.

UpGuard has always adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software, ensuring fast and consistent releases that have been tested for quality.

Security ratings providers can be very expensive, with opaque pricing policies designed to put the power in the hands of the provider. Vendor risk solutions are typically priced per vendor per year, except in some cases where one-off reports are generated for a set price. Some of the more expensive solutions price out small and medium businesses, while relegating even large companies to managing only their top few vendors. All three provide professional services to assist with setup and maintenance.

• BitSight: Public pricing information is not available. Pricing is reported to start at $20,000 plus $2,000-$2,500 per vendor per year
• RiskRecon: Public pricing information is not available. Pricing is reported to start at $10,000 and increases based on the number of vendors monitored.
• UpGuard: UpGuard has a transparent pricing model which you can view here. UpGuard pricing starts at $5k/year and scales with your company. If you have any questions, please let us know via sales@upguard.com and we will follow up.

Accessing the information in a security ratings product outside of its graphical interface is important for integrated business strategies and consolidating data to a preferred system. All three solutions offer standard APIs to pull data into other enterprise applications.

While the API is useful for building custom integrations, standard integrations can cut the overhead of tying the vendor risk product to the rest of the organization.

• BitSight: Offers integrations with RSA Archer GRC, CyberGRX, OneTrust Vendorpedia, ProcessUnity, MetricStream, and more.
• RiskRecon: Offers integrations with GRC platforms such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.
• UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Sometimes the best proof is who else uses the product, but all three companies have impressive customer lists, with none more distinguished than the other.

• BitSight: Customers include The University of North Florida, Snam, EPAM, and PROSA.
• RiskRecon: Customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
• UpGuard: Customers include NASA, the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), Morningstar, Akamai, Bill.com, IAG, and ADP. Read our customer case studies here and our Gartner reviews here.

The whole point of assessing first and third-party risk is to head off incidents down the road. This makes the ability of the solution to predict data breaches and other incidents a key consideration. What differentiates predictive capability is how well the methodology that determines the security ratings applies to actual attack vectors.

• BitSight: The IP reputation methodology helps catch active malware installations, but that’s only one possible way a data breach can occur.
• RiskRecon: RiskRecon focuses on third-party assessment across 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.
• UpGuard: Because UpGuard checks for misconfigurations across the internet footprint, many important breach vectors are covered, including phishing, ransomware susceptibility (like WannaCry), man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, and DNS issues. The UpGuard methodology continuously refined based on the actual data breaches we have discovered and reported to the world in the New York Times, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Forbes, and Techcrunch.

Let's take a look at how all three companies compared when assessed by UpGuard's platform on July 28, 2020.