BitSight vs SecurityScorecard 2021 Comparison and Review

The following is a breakdown comparing the options across ratings, methodology and scope.

Security Ratings

All three solutions provide security ratings, aggregated summaries of risk for immediate understanding and comparison. Each scoring methodology provides a standardized way to look at organizations in the context of cyber risk.

• BitSight - a credit score-like rating between 250-900.
• SecurityScorecard - a rating from A to F, like a report card.
• UpGuard - a rating called CSTAR, that scores companies from 0-950, with individual ratings for every site under a company’s umbrella.

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. Scanning for misconfigurations means looking at an organization’s actual internet footprint and determining how it compares to best practices and what vulnerabilities that lead to data breaches are exposed.

• BitSight - Primarily IP reputation.
• SecurityScorecard - Primarily IP reputation.
• UpGuard - Misconfiguration focused assessment.

Scope

Not every solution supports every vendor. Many organizations employ small specialists vendors that are not covered by solutions with a narrow scope of focus. Every vendor that handles data is a potential point of breach and should be covered for the risk they bring to the company.

• BitSight - ~100,000 supported organizations
• SecurityScorecard - ~120,000 supported organizations
• UpGuard - ~2,000,000 organizations scanned every day

Minimizing the amount of overhead in acquiring and using a new solution is key to making that solution deliver on its capabilities. All three solutions are cloud-based 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, can easily compare vendors.
• SecurityScorecard - Simple interface for quick grade reports and charts.
• UpGuard - High level summation of risk with the ability to drill down into precise technical detail. Provides remediation and protection suggestions for all risks. Comes with built in questionnaires that can be sent and managed from within the console. Read our full guide on the top security questionnaires here.

Making information publicly available to help customers and prospects reduces administrative overhead and provides users with resources for troubleshooting and decision making. How each company ties into the community speaks to its mission and focus.

• BitSight - Company and product blog.
• SecurityScorecard - Company and product blog.
• UpGuard - Company and product blog, and a breach research blog that has broken stories on some of the largest data breaches since 2017.

Technology is always changing. The rate at which a company updates their software determines how agile it is in response to customer requests and new features, as well as how consistently it is being patched and hardened. The full release histories for these products are not publicly available. However, like most new software, the releases are relatively fast and regular.

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

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 directly available, but prices are reported to be around $2000-$2500 per vendor per year.
• SecurityScorecard - Public pricing is not directly available. Prices reported to be between $1500-$2000 per vendor per year.
• 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 cyber risk 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 data center.

• Bitsight -Offers integrations with RSA Archer GRC, CyberGRX, OneTrust Vendorpedia, ProcessUnity, MetricStream, and more.
• SecurityScorecard - Offers integrations with GRC platforms such as Archer.
• UpGuard - Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Sometimes the proof is in the pudding, but all three companies have impressive client lists, with none more distinguished than the other.

• BitSight - Customers include Lowe's, Target, Ferrari, and The Hartford, and T-Mobile
• SecurityScorecard - Customers include Netflix, McDonald's, Allstate, Symantec, and Pepsi
• UpGuard - Customers include ADP, the New York Stock Exchange (ICE), and NASA

The whole point of managing vendor 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 breach vectors.

• BitSight/SecurityScorecard - The IP reputation methodology helps catch active malware installations, but that’s only one possible way a data breach can occur. Both companies include additional data, but lack the transparency to prove the efficacy of their scores.
• 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 has been refined based on the actual data breaches we have discovered and reported to the world.

For an example of vendor risk scoring, let’s take a look at all three companies through UpGuard’s Cyber Security Ratings and see how they compare as of January 2nd, 2018. Although all risk ratings are good, UpGuard leads the pack, with nearly 200 points on BitSight.