PrevalentvsRiskReconUpGuard

The usability and design of a product play a large part in how quickly you can get up to speed and start getting your money's worth.

Prevalent, RiskRecon, and UpGuard offer their services via SaaS and are accessible from web-based platforms that can help you find, assess, and monitor vendors.  

• Prevalent: Risks detailed on each point-in-time vendor assessment, as well as cybersecurity risk ratings.
• 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. Each risk is prioritized based on extensive research conducted by our in-house security team, and where possible, we provide remediation and protection suggestions. Additionally, we have a library of pre-built questionnaires that can be sent and managed with the UpGuard platform, including a pandemic (e.g., COVID-19), ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CCPA, and Modern Slavery questionnaires. Read our full guide on the top security questionnaires here.

Prevalent can help you continuously monitor vendor controls by correlating assessments with monitoring for cyber threats, which produces a security rating. They help automate risk assessments and have an exchange where completed vendor risk reports can be shared.

RiskRecon provides security ratings that aggregate different risks into a single risk rating that allows for immediate and easy comparison of organizations, third-party vendors, business units, and service providers.

Like Prevalent, UpGuard uses risk assessments and security ratings to provide a holistic overview of an organization's security risk. As you likely know, it can be hard to get a time-poor vendor to complete a questionnaire, and when they do, the results are subjective and are rendered inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge.  

They do, however, provide valuable information that security ratings cannot generally offer, that is, internal security issues and controls.

Additionally, security ratings provide a data-driven, instantaneous, and always up-to-date measurement of an organization's external security posture. Together, they offer an excellent overview of an organization's internal and external security performance.

According to Gartner, cybersecurity ratings will become as important as credit ratings when assessing the risk of existing and new business relationships…these services will become a precondition for business relationships and part of the standard of due care for providers and procurers of services. Additionally, the services will have expanded their scope to assess other areas, such as cyber insurance, due diligence for M&A, and even as a raw metric for internal security programs.

And Forrester expects cybersecurity ratings to become a de facto standard in the boardroom by 2025. Investors and traditional debt ratings agencies will include cybersecurity as a risk factor for rating the ability to repay company debt (influenced in part by the cybersecurity ratings market).

Read our full guide on security ratings to understand all their use cases.

• Prevalent: Provides a risk rating between 0 and 100.
• RiskRecon: RiskRecon distills its assessment criteria into a single 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.

Prevalent vs. RiskRecon: Risk Assessment Methodology

Each service relies on a different risk assessment methodology to assess the potential risk of an IT vendor. RiskRecon relies on misconfiguration scanning. Misconfiguration scanning means they look at an organization's Internet footprint to determine how it compares to best practices and what security gaps could lead to successful cyberattacks on an organization's confidentiality, integrity, or availability.  

The standardization of security assessment practices against recognized security frameworks, and making attestations easily shareable helps all business save time, resources, and increases trust in the supply chain.

That's why Prevalent and UpGuard have introduced ways for customers to save time and money by publishing completed security assessments and supporting documentation in their platforms.

Additionally, both platforms use security ratings to provide real-time critical risk monitoring capabilities, integrated vendor processes, and accessibility to provide businesses with a complete solution.

• Prevalent: Augments point-in-time risk assessments with security ratings to provide an overview of third and fourth-party risk.
• RiskRecon: Assesses an organization against 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.
• UpGuard: Augments point-in-time risk assessments with security ratings to ensure information is always up-to-date. Our security ratings algorithm 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). We give each identified issue a risk prioritization category, so you know what to focus on first.

Prevalent vs. RiskRecon: Scope

As you know, even small vendors can lead to significant data breaches, e.g., the HVAC vendor that eventually led to Target's exposure of credit card and personal data on more than 110 million consumers.

Not every solution provides the same level of coverage. If your organization employs small specialist vendors, ensure the solution covers them. As you know, it is best practice to monitor any vendor that handles sensitive data continuously.

• Prevalent: Unknown
• RiskRecon: Unknown
• UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily, and customers can automatically add new vendors.

The main reason we all invest in security tools is to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

A solution's ability to prevent data breaches and other cyber attacks is the most important thing, and this category is where Prevalent, RiskRecon, and UpGuard truly differ.

• Prevalent: Relies on point-in-time risk assessments and cybersecurity risk ratings based on monitoring 1,500+ criminal forums; thousands of onion pages, 80+ dark web special access forums; 65+ threat intelligence feeds; and 50+ paste sites for leaked credentials and potentially targeted companies — as well as several security communities, code repositories, and vulnerability databases.
• RiskRecon: focuses on third-party assessment across 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.  
• UpGuard: As UpGuard checks for misconfigurations across your Internet footprint, many important breach vectors are covered. Such as phishing, ransomware susceptibility (like WannaCry), man-in-the-middle attacks, DNSSEC, vulnerabilities, email spoofing, domain hijacking, network security, and DNS issues. For example, we were able to detect data exposed in a GitHub repository by an AWS engineer in 30 minutes. We reported it to AWS, and the repo was secured the same day. This repo contained personal identity documents and system credentials, including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys. We're able to do this because we actively discover exposed datasets on the open and deep web, scouring open S3 buckets, public Github repositories, and unsecured RSync and FTP servers. Our data leak discovery engine continuously searches for keyword lists provided by our customers. Additionally, it is continually refined by our team of analysts, using the expertise and techniques gleaned from years of breach research. The UpGuard methodology is 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.

Prevalent, RiskRecon, and UpGuard all invest in their community and try to make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to get up to speed, reduce operational overhead, and decide on the right product for them.

Each company has its blog that is a useful source of information for cybersecurity awareness training, as well as vendor risk management best practices.

• Prevalent: 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.

Information security needs to constantly adapt and change to keep up with changes with the information and technology it protects and vendor risk management best practices are constantly changing too.

CVE adds new vulnerabilities daily, attackers find new ways to exploit programming errors, and security controls become invalid constantly.

You need to be able to rely on your security tooling, and that means they need to be able to incorporate changes quickly.

UpGuard has adopted DevOps principles internally to develop, test, and release software continuously, ensuring fast, consistent, and thoroughly tested releases.

Third-party risk management software is expensive. The industry often uses opaque pricing policies designed to take power away from the purchaser. Vendor risk solutions are typically priced on a per vendor, per year basis except for fixed-price reports.

RiskRecon is more expensive than UpGuard, and Prevalent has no public pricing available. Their high prices can price out small to medium-size businesses and relegate large organizations to managing only their most at-risk vendors.

• Prevalent: Public pricing information is not available.
• 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.

While Prevalent, RiskRecon, and UpGuard have their platforms, customers may want to access the resources on a different platform or consolidate reporting into a centralized dashboard.

The good news is all services offer standard APIs to pull data.

APIs are useful for technical staff, but not all vendor risk management teams have access to developers. Without developers, standard third-party integrations become an important part of decision-making.  

• Prevalent: Integrates with ServiceNow.
• 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.

The best proof comes from each solution's customers. Prevalent, RiskRecon, and UpGuard all have impressive customer lists, none more distinguished than the other.

• Prevalent: Customers include Iron Mountain, Pfizer, London Stock Exchange, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Ford.
• 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.

Here's what a few UpGuard customers had to say about their experience. You can read more on Gartner reviews.

• "UpGuard has given us a view of our vendor security posture. The ability to launch a questionnaire or ask for a plan of remediation for items that show as vulnerable is also a great added value and a time saver. UpGuard is also very customer focused. They respond quickly to issues and questions and welcome any input that could improve the product. Overall it is one of the best value add tools we have."
• "The simplicity of the product is fantastic. My team and I were able to be up and running in minutes. We monitor risks on over 25 vendors in near real-time and use these statistics to report to the C suite and Board of Directors. Upguard has become part of the critical cybersecurity metrics that we monitor and report upon."
• "The ease of use and simplicity of the product is excellent. We were able to be up and running with 50 vendors within minutes, not hours. The reporting is used for monthly statistics and is reported to our Senior Management. Upguard has become an integral part of our critical cybersecurity metrics that we monitor and report upon."

Finally, let's take a look at how Prevalent, RiskRecon, and UpGuard compare when assessed by UpGuard's platform on July 28, 2020. It's important to note that UpGuard adheres to the Principles of Fair and Accurate Security Ratings:

• Transparency: UpGuard believes in providing full and timely transparency not only to our customers but to any organization that wants to understand their security posture, which is why you can request your free security rating here. You can also book a free trial of our platform here.
• Dispute, Correction, and Appeal: UpGuard is committed to working with customers, vendors, and any organization that believes their score is not accurate or outdated.
• Accuracy and Validation: UpGuard's security ratings are empirical, data-driven, and based on independently verifiable and accessible information.
• Model Governance: The datasets and methodologies used to calculate our security ratings can change from time to time to better reflect our understanding of how to mitigate cybersecurity risk. When they do, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about the impact on their security rating.
• Independence: No commercial agreement or lack thereof, gives an organization the ability to improve its security rating without improving their security posture.
• Confidentiality: Any information disclosed to UpGuard during a challenged rating or dispute is appropriately protected. Nor do we provide third-parties with sensitive or confidential information on rated organizations that could lead to system compromise.