There are a lot of security ratings providers now, and choosing the right one can be overwhelming. That's why we wrote this post to make it as easy as possible to help you compare RiskRecon and UpGuard.
Regardless of whether you're a CISO, Vice President of Security or an individual contributor, it's safe to say you understand how important cybersecurity risk management is. Technology has increased the speed, scale, and impact of all aspects of commerce, while also increasing the risk of data leaks, data breaches, malware, and other cyber threats.
Poor cybersecurity can have a huge impact on your bottom line, with the global average cost of a data breach growing 12 percent in the last five years to $3.92 million. If you operate in a heavily regulated industry, such as healthcare or financial services, your average would likely be much higher. For example, healthcare had an average industry cost of $6.45 million.
This is due to the large amounts of sensitive data, personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI) that healthcare organizations store and process.
Even if you don't currently operate in a regulated industry, the introduction of general data protection regulations around the world means the scope of what must be protected is ever-expanding.
Most of these regulations are extraterritorial, which means they apply to your organizations if you process any of their constituent's data. Regardless of whether you operate in their jurisdiction. Examples include the EU's GDPR, Canada's PIPEDA, Florida's FIPA, New York's SHIELD Act, California's CCPA, and Brazil's LGPD.
And most of these laws also have data breach notification requirements, increasing the reputational damage of successful cyber attacks. This is a big reason why so many organizations have invested in security ratings tools to help them instantly assess security postures to help scale their first and third-party risk management programs. Best-in-class organizations have even begun to manage their fourth-party and fifth-party risk.
One of the most common issues we see is that cyber risk management requires buy-in from all levels of the organization, which requires the translation of technical details like security postures, cybersecurity risk assessments, vendor questionnaires, and information security policies into terms that even non-technical stakeholders can easily understand.
We believe security ratings are the best way to do this without adding any operational overhead to your organization. They provide an instantaneous assessment of cyber risk, much like a credit score does for credit risk.
Gartner agrees with us, 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.
As does Forrester, cyber-risk rating tools show their value right away. They will scan and score your third-party risk environment and identify glaring gaps of key partners as early as your initial meeting.
We wrote the post to solve the main issue many of our prospects face: the increasing number of security ratings providers to pick from including BitSight, SecurityScorecard, RiskRecon, CyberGRX, MetricStream, Prevalent, Normshield, and Panorays.
The issue is that the methodologies employed by these threat intelligence tools vary greatly, as do their results.
For example, BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and RiskRecon focus primarily on the assessment of business partners, vendors, and service providers, if you want to see see how these services stack up read our other comparison posts:
In contrast, UpGuard has a complete continuous monitoring risk management solution that handles behind-the-firewall risk with UpGuard Core, vendor risk management with UpGuard Vendor Risk, and data leak detection and cybersecurity performance management with UpGuard BreachSight.
In this post, we'll help you understand what to look for in a security ratings solution, so you can make an informed decision about whether to go with RiskRecon or UpGuard.
But before we dive into the specifics, it's important to understand what security risk ratings are and why they are important.
What are Security Ratings?
Security ratings are a data-driven, objective, and up-to-date measurement of an organization's external security posture. This means the collective security status of all their Internet-facing software, hardware, services, networks, information, vendors, and service providers.
Just as a FICO score aims to provide a quantitative measure of credit risk, security ratings provide a quantitative measure of cyber risk, which can be used and understood by non-technical stakeholders.
The higher the security rating, the better the organization's security posture.
Security ratings are commonly used for assessing the cybersecurity of external organizations like vendors, investment targets, insurance applicants, as well as assessing internal risk, and to improve decision-making and communication around cybersecurity performance management.
Third-party risk management and security teams use security ratings to manage and reduce cybersecurity risk, including:
- Understanding third-party risk and fourth-party risk (vendor risk) posed by supply chain, third-party vendor, and business partner relationships.
- Cyber insurance underwriting, pricing and risk management by allowing insurers to gain visibility into the security program of those they insure to better assess and price their insurance policies.
- Investment in or acquisition of a company by providing organizations with an independent assessment of an investment or M&A target's information security controls.
- Enabling governments to better understand and manage theirs and their vendors' cybersecurity performance, a key component of FISMA compliance.
- Continual assessment of internal cybersecurity posture, providing CISOs with a simple, understandable rating that can be presented to key stakeholders including C-Suite and board members.
- Benchmarking and comparison to industry peers, competitors, sectors, and vendors. This can assist with decision-making and provide context about what security controls or mitigations your organization needs to invest in.
- Providing assurance to customers, insurers, regulators and other stakeholders that your organization cares about preventing security issues like data breaches, malware, phishing, and ransomware.
Read our complete guide on security ratings here.
RiskRecon Overview
RiskRecon is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT with a presence in Boston, MA and representatives around the world. RiskRecon makes it easy to gain deep, risk contextualized insight into the cybersecurity risk performance of all third-parties by continuously monitoring across 11 security domains and 41 security criteria.
Like UpGuard, it can be used for third-party risk management, enterprise risk management, and mergers & acquisitions.
