PrevalentvsWhisticUpGuard

The usability and learning curve of a product can play a large part in your decision. Not only can they help you get up to speed quicker, but they can also improve return on investment and general joy using the product.

Prevalent, Whistic, 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.
• Whistic: Surfacing risks rely on point-in-time vendor assessments, which means new threats can go unidentified until the next assessment process. Remediation requests are not available. Their risk assessments align with the VSA questionnaire, The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)'s CAIQ, SIG, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Security Controls, and Privacy Shield Framework.
• 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 uses a combination of point-in-time risk assessments with automated monitoring for cyber threats to produce a security rating. They help automate parts of the risk assessment process and have an exchange where completed vendor risk reports can be shared.

In contrast, Whistic relies on point-in-time risk assessment of third-party vendors to determine enterprise risk and primarily focuses on the results of vendor security assessments.

Like Prevalent, UpGuard takes a combined approach using risk assessments and security ratings to provide a holistic view of an organization's security risk.

As you know, it can be hard to get risk assessments completed by time-poor vendors, and when they do, the results can be subjective and are rendered inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge.

Risk assessments do provide valuable information that can be missed by security ratings, which is why a combined approach is best.

For reference, security ratings provide a data-driven, instantaneous, and always up-to-date measurement of an organization's external security posture. When paired with risk assessments, they offer a comprehensive 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.
• Whistic: Relies on standardized security questionnaires.
• 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. Whistic: Risk Assessment Methodology

Each service relies on its proprietary risk assessment methodology to assess the potential risk introduced by a vendor.

Prevalent uses a combination of point-in-time risk assessments with their security ratings to determine the level of risk presented by a vendor. Risk assessments can be shared on the platform by vendors for other customers to use.

In contrast, Whistic focuses on conducting and responding to security reviews. Whistic helps remove inefficiencies in third-party risk management programs for organizations and their vendors alike, rather than completing the same questionnaire over and over, they can choose to publish it to their security profile.

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

That's why UpGuard, like Prevalent and Whistic, has introduced a way for customers to save time and money by publishing completed security assessments and supporting documentation to the platform.

Additionally, UpGuard's platform provides real-time risk monitoring capabilities, integrated vendor processes, and data leak detection 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.
• Whistic: Relies on point-in-time risk assessments that can become outdated until the next assessment process.
• 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. Whistic: Scope

Even small vendors can lead to significant data breaches. Just look at Target's HVAC vendor that eventually led to the 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
• Whistic: Unknown
• UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily, and customers can automatically add new vendors.

The real reason we invest in security tools is to prevent cyber attacks from happening, which is why a solution's ability to predict and to avoid data breaches and cyber threats is the most important thing.

Prevalent, Whistic, and UpGuard genuinely differ in predictive capabilities.

• 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.
• Whistic: Relies on risk assessments, which can quickly become out of date as attackers discover new zero-day exploits and companies deploy new IT infrastructure. The truth is that questionnaires, much like penetration testing, can be subjective and become inaccurate over time as new security issues emerge. Additionally, Whistic provides no controls for capturing data loss incidents.
• 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, Whistic, and UpGuard all invest heavily in community support and try to make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to get up to speed, reduce their operational overhead, and decide on which tool is right for them.

Each company has its blog that is a useful source of information for cybersecurity awareness training and vendor risk management best practices. Only UpGuard has published robust data breach and data leak research.

• Prevalent: Company and product blog.
• Whistic: 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 most significant data breaches.

Information technology is in constant flux, so the information security controls designed to protect it need to adapt to keep up with it, and this is why vendor risk management best practices are always changing.

New vulnerabilities are added to CVE every day, and attackers find new zero-day exploits that make traditional security controls invalid.

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

Your security tools need to be able to incorporate further information for you to be able to rely on them.  

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

The third-party risk management software industry is expensive. Vendors often use opaque pricing policies designed to take power away from the purchaser.

With that said, most vendor risk solutions will be priced on a per vendor, per year basis except for fixed-price, one-off reports.

We weren't able to find any publicly available pricing on Prevalent. Whistic's pricing appears to start at $25,000, so if you're a small company, you may not be able to afford what seems to be an enterprise pricing strategy.

• Prevalent: Public pricing information is not available.
• Whistic: Reported to start at $25,000 and based on the number of vendors managed in the platform or the number of security questionnaires you're responding to.
• 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, Whistic, and UpGuard have their platforms, you may want to access resources in a different platform or consolidate statistics into a proprietary centralized dashboard.

In this situation, an API can help. The good news is each provides a standard API.  

APIs are great if you have access to technical talent, but not all vendor risk management teams do. Without developers, you're more reliant on the company's partner ecosystem and third-party integrations.

• Prevalent: Integrates with ServiceNow.
• Whistic: Integrates with RiskRecon, Active Directory, Okta, and OneLogin.
• UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

Often the proof comes from the customer. Prevalent, Whistic, and UpGuard all have impressive customer lists, and none are more impressive than the other.

• Prevalent: Customers include Iron Mountain, Pfizer, London Stock Exchange, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Ford.
• Whistic: Customers include Betterment, Invision, Airbnb, Zynga, and Robinhood.
• 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, Whistic, 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 openness 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 enhancing 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.