The average cost of a data breach is now nearly $4 million and the unfortunate truth is third-parties are a significant source of cyber risk.
This is why cybersecurity vendor risk management (VRM) has become a top priority for CISOs, Vice Presidents of Security, 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.
This is business as usual for financial services and healthcare organizations, but a new issue to solve for many other industries.
With the introduction of general data protection laws, most organizations now need some semblance of a third-party risk management program.
For example in the United States Califonia 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 SecurityScorecard, Prevalent, and UpGuard, so you can make an informed decision and choose the tool that is right for you.
SecurityScorecard overview
SecurityScorecard is a New York-based company that uses traffic and other publicly accessible data to build security ratings that can be used to evaluate vendors, price cyber insurance, among other use cases. SecurityScorecard's Co-founder and CEO is Alex Yampolskiy.
They also monitor "hacker chatter", social networks, and public data breach feeds for indicators of compromise.
SecurityScorecard's last funding round was a Series D from Nokia Growth Partners, Moody's, AXA Strategic Ventures, Intel, Google Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and Evolution Equity Partners.

Prevalent overview
Prevalent is a Phoenix-based company that enables you to reveal and reduce vendor risk with its 360-degree third-party risk management platform.
Prevalent's cybersecurity risk rating solution helps organizations manage and monitor the security threats and risks associated with third and fourth-party vendors.
Their tools can be used for third-party risk management, vendor risk management, data privacy, internal IT & cybersecurity assessment, and by vendors.
