RiskRecon vs Whistic

Organizations are taking on more cyber risk than ever before and a large part comes in the form of third-party and fourth-party risk. The news is inundated with data breaches and data leaks and the average cost of a data breach has reached nearly $4 million globally. It’s safe to say that the financial cost alone is enough proof to start investing in tools to prevent data breaches.

The unfortunate truth is third-parties cause data breaches. That’s why cybersecurity and vendor risk management (VRM) has become a top priority for CISOs, Vice Presidents of Security, security professionals, and other members of senior management, even at the Board level.

In addition to financial costs, there are increased regulatory and reputational costs.

Governments are enacting laws and regulations designed to promote, or require, third-party cyber risk management programs to identify, assess, mitigate and oversee risks created by vendors, fourth-parties, and customers.

While this is BAU for some industries, it’s a new problem to tackle for many others. The introduction of general data protection laws means most organizations need to follow vendor risk management best practices.

For example in the United States California has introduced CCPA and Florida has introduced FIPA to protect the personally identifiable information of their constituents. Outside of the United States, GDPR, LGPD, and PIPEDA are three important extraterritorial laws from the European Union, Brazil, and Canada respectively. Alongside the protection of PII and PHI, many of these laws have introduced mandatory data breach notification requirements which have greatly increased the reputational impact of inadequate vendor and cybersecurity risk management practices.

To add to this, security teams have more expected to not only manage and improve security postures and information security policies, but to translate technical details from cybersecurity risk assessments and vendor questionnaires into terms that non-technical stakeholders can understand.

The good news is third-party risk management tools can help you do exactly that. The issue is it’s hard to decide on which ones to assess, let alone what criteria to assess them against.

That’s why we wrote this post to provide you with a clear comparison between RiskRecon, Whistic, and UpGuard, so you can make an informed decision and choose the tool that is right for you.

RiskRecon Overview

RiskRecon is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT with a presence in Boston, MA and representatives around the world. RiskRecon is lead by its CEO and Co-founder Kelly White.

They 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.

Riskrecon UI. Source: riskrecon.com

Whistic Overview

Whistic, Inc is based in Salt Lake City, Utah and aims to help companies hold each other accountable for protecting their shared data. Whistic’s CEO is Nick Sorensen.

The Whistic platform helps customers conduct and respond to security reviews in a single platform.

Their platform has tools to help you onboard, assess, and track vendors, allowing you to compare third-parties against a set of predefined criteria based on vendor questionnaires, documentation, and metadata.

Vendors can assess themselves against one of the top vendor questionnaires and publish it to their profile, along with supporting documentation including audits and certifications.

Whistic UI. Source: whistic.com

User experience and design play a large part in how quickly you can get up to speed and start getting your money’s worth.

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

• RiskRecon: Provides risk prioritization based on your configured policy.
• Whistic: Risks detailed on each point-in-time vendor assessment, which means new risks are only detected during the next assessment process. Remediation requests are not available. Their risk assessments are aligned to the VSA questionnaire, 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 remediation and protection suggestions are provided. 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.

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

Whistic relies on point-in-time risk assessment to determine enterprise risk and primarily focuses on the results of standardized questionnaires.

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 provide, 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 provide 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.

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

• RiskRecon: RiskRecon distills its assessment criteria into a simple score from 0-10.
• 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.

RiskRecon vs. Whistic: 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. This 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 cyber attacks on an organization’s confidentiality, integrity, or availability.

Whistic is focused on conducting and responding to security reviews. This is designed to 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.

UpGuard takes a combined approach. We believe the standardization of security assessment practices against recognized security frameworks, as well as making attestations easily shareable is great and helps organizations save time, money, and increases trust in the supply chain.

That’s why we’ve also introduced a security assessment exchange that allows our customers to create a security profile that lists out supporting information like a SOC 2 report or completed security questionnaires.

We also believe that scanning for misconfiguration and security issues is just as important. That’s why we also add critical risk monitoring capabilities, integrated vendor processes, and accessibility to provide you with a complete solution for your risk and compliance needs.

Think of UpGuard as a combination of Whistic and RiskRecon. Our platform can help determine potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities that lead to data breaches.

• RiskRecon: Assesses an organization against 11 security domains and 41 security criteria
• 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). Each identified issue is given a risk prioritization category so you know what represents the highest risk.

RiskRecon vs. Whistic: Scope

As you know, even small vendors can lead to large 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 they may not be covered by a solution. As you know, any vendor that handles sensitive data is a potential risk that should be continuously monitored and accounted for.

• RiskRecon: unknown
• Whistic: Unknown
• UpGuard: 2,000,000 organizations scanned daily and new vendors can be automatically added by customers.

RiskRecon, Whistic, 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 own blog that is a useful source of information for cybersecurity awareness training, as well as vendor risk management best practices.

• RiskRecon: 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 largest data breaches.

InfoSec needs to constantly adapt and change to keep up with changes with the information and technology it is designed to protect. This means vendor risk management best practices are constantly changing too.

New vulnerabilities are added to CVE on a daily basis, 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 on a continuous basis, ensuring fast, consistent, and safe releases that are thoroughly tested.

Software can be expensive, especially third-party risk management software. 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 in some cases where reports can be generated for a fixed price.

RiskRecon and Whistic are more expensive than UpGuard. Their high prices can price out small to medium-size businesses and relegate large organizations to managing only their most at-risk vendors.

• RiskRecon: Public pricing information is not available. Pricing is reported to start at $10,000 and increases based on the number of vendors monitored.
• Whistic: Reported to start at $25,000 and is based on the number of vendors managed in the platform or the number of security questionnaires to which you’re responding.
• 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 RiskRecon, Whistic, and UpGuard have their own 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. This is why standard third-party integrations are an important part of decision-making.

• RiskRecon: Offers integrations with GRC platforms such as RSA Archer, Sigma Ratings, Whistic, and more.
• Whistic: Integrates with RiskRecon, Active Directory, Okta, and onelogin.
• UpGuard: Integrates with GRC platforms, ticketing systems like ServiceNow, and more.

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

• RiskRecon: Customers include Informatica, Tufts Health Plan, University of San Francisco, and Sentara.
• 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 to 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 RiskRecon, 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 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 and you can 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: While 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, we provide reasonable notice and explanation to our customers about how their security rating may be impacted.
• 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 the course of 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.