SecurityScorecard’s Board Trends Report Provides Actionable Insight

With cyber attacks becoming increasingly prevalent, boards of directors and executives need to evaluate those risks and become more involved with cybersecurity. “In Gartner’s 2020 Board of Directors survey, 69% of respondents stated they view digital as the top business challenge for 2020 and 2021. Not only that, but 49% of directors cite the need to reduce legal, compliance and reputation risk related to digital investments.” The heightened concern around cybersecurity by executive leadership and boards is driven by the need to protect their organization’s brand reputation, protect customer privacy, and support other regulatory and compliance demands. With the shift to remote work and operations, companies now realize how vulnerable they are in an environment where most of their business interactions are conducted through online channels.

As executive leadership and boards become increasingly concerned about their organization’s ability to manage cyber risk, security teams need an easy and efficient way to communicate the state of cybersecurity risk to non-technical leadership. While security and IT teams are responsible for an extensive list of activities, what executives and boards want to understand at a high-level is that the organization is actively monitoring risk and if that risk is increasing or decreasing.

What makes an effective cybersecurity report?

An effective cybersecurity report needs to be quantifiable and should frame the risks as they pertain to the business’s goals, strategies, and risk tolerance. Typically they should avoid using technical jargon, and focus on actionable data so the board knows where the organization stands and the next steps that need to be taken. Instead of spending valuable time pulling data and building reports, security and IT teams need an easy solution that instantly provides the data and visibility they need to present on the value of their activities. The time saved could be spent on critical activities that protect the organization.

How SecurityScorecard’s Board Trends Report can help

SecurityScorecard’s newly released Board Trends Report feature enables users to have easy conversations with internal stakeholders (Board of directors, C-level peers) and explain cybersecurity trends and changes in a non-technical way.

Whether your organization requires weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports on cyber risk trends, the Board Trends Report can be downloaded instantly with easy-to-understand data points.

This new report focuses on third-party risk management and allows you to:

• View the trending security score of your entire portfolio over time (customizable)
• Easily understand the number of organizations you’re monitoring and have visibility into those vendors
• Gain insight into the number of active organizations in your monitored portfolio
• Seamlessly track activity and mitigations by your internal teams and partners across your monitored organizations
• Review the number of data breaches/issues that occurred within your monitored organizations
• Quickly identify organizations whose security health is improving or declining

Within this report, there are various graphs and contextualized information that can be used to tell a story to executives and boards on cybersecurity posture engagement and trends. In addition, vendor risk teams can accelerate their time spent pulling data to create reports and easily demonstrate that the team is decreasing vendor security risk over time by monitoring overall third and fourth-party risk. Through this report, teams are able to gain a thorough understanding of external security risk and take the appropriate steps to mitigate this risk. This helps teams prioritize and take appropriate steps to mitigate risk while demonstrating to executives that your team is taking action in helping reduce relative breach likelihood.

Using this Board Trends Report executives and the board members are able to stay informed while security and IT teams are able to take the necessary steps to protect the organization.

SecurityScorecard recognizes the importance of enabling teams to effectively communicate about cybersecurity to the board and executives. With this in mind, further enhancements will be made to the Board Trends Report with additional use cases, such as self-monitoring and peer and industry benchmarking.