Everyone tracks progress. Whether it’s academics, health, or job skills, people need visibility into where they started and how well they’re advancing toward a goal. From a business perspective, tracking progress gives insight into whether the organization is prioritizing activities for long-term initiatives or whether it needs to take corrective action. Sometimes, the progress reports remain internal. Other times, organizations share them with customers and business partners.
Tracking cybersecurity progress is a business initiative
Measuring and tracking cybersecurity progress proves that an organization consistently and continuously takes action to mitigate new risks. As organizations work to protect against the latest vulnerabilities, they install security updates for applications, operating systems, and infrastructure components. They monitor the latest CVE’s and assess digital assets for exposure.
Recent research notes that senior leadership teams and boards of directors recognize that ransomware is now a cost of doing business. As cybercriminals continue to attack organizations, cyber risk management progress reports become more important because they document security activities and give executives a way to prove governance.
Self-assessment
Most organizations use self-assessments to meet compliance mandates. They give your senior executive team and board of directors visibility into how well your team secures critical digital assets. Most compliance mandates assign responsibility for governing, or reviewing, cybersecurity posture. These reports are one way to help meet those requirements.
The Company Trends report in the SecurityScorecard Ratings platform illustrates how well you’re managing cybersecurity risk. The report documents progress across all ten risk factors that affect your total score, drilling down into specific threat prevention activities. The same report includes how new findings compare with the remediation activity your team has undertaken, giving key stakeholders the visibility they need.
This is a powerful way to measure threat prevention effectiveness, even as new threats are arising more frequently.
Third-party progress
As supply chain attacks become more common, third-party cybersecurity risk posture is increasingly important. Traditionally, gathering the evidence to support vendor risk management meant hours of data gathering across your vendor portfolio. Aggregating this data into a single report shows the security posture across your digital ecosystem. With SecurityScorecard’s Board Trends report, you can quickly create reports showing third-party risk program performance. These reports give executive teams and Boards of Directors the documentation needed to prove governance.
However, sometimes you need a progress report for a specific company in your portfolio. Some key examples of when you might need to do this include:
- Placing a strategic vendor on a “watch list” after they experience a data breach
- Looking at an ecosystem partner as an M&A target
In these types of situations, you only want visibility into that organization’s cybersecurity posture. You need documentation that you can provide your executive leadership team, board of directors, compliance manager, auditor, or acquisition team.
The Company Trends report available within the SecurityScorecard Ratings platform gives you this visibility quickly and easily.
Visibility into cybersecurity risk management practices and progress is increasingly important as both a business initiative and a competitive differentiator. When it comes to third-party risk management, you need to show risk management progress across your entire vendor portfolio. However, sometimes you need to see a specific vendor’s posture and progress.
SecurityScorecard makes this easy by letting you “double-click” to look at a specific company in your digital ecosystem so you can understand how a single firm’s progress influences your security posture.
