How Cyber Scoring Can Turn Technical and Confusing Results into Smart Business Decisions.
Let’s face it. Cyber has a bad rap. Think about the last news story you read or listened to that discussed cybersecurity. More than likely, you’ll remember a story about a hack or a security breach. So it’s no surprise that cybersecurity can seem especially scary to business leaders thanks to the constant and never-ending stream of bad press around the topic. When business leaders are only hearing of breaches and hacks in industry news, cybersecurity becomes top of mind in a negative way.
Another challenge around cyber happens in the boardroom. Information technology, cybersecurity, and cloud computing are intangible business costs that cannot be easily viewed, monitored, and therefore measured. Because of this, knowing when your business is “secure enough” becomes difficult, and can feel like a bottomless pit of expenses on the P&L statement that are difficult to justify. It can be hard enough as an IT professional to know where a business is on the cybersecurity continuum, much less a business executive who doesn’t have extensive training in cybersecurity.
Using cybersecurity as a useful business tool.
However, there is a way to turn the complex and complicated insights of cybersecurity into valuable data that will lead to smarter business decisions all around. Similar to credit scoring, cyber scoring puts tangible measurement on cyber risk, giving businesses the ability to see and measure the impact of security investments.
Business leaders can be more knowledgeable about where they are on the cybersecurity continuum, and also have a tool to be able to make a cost-benefit analysis of how much resources they're willing to invest in order to reduce that cyber risk. By having access to a cyber score that’s meaningful and easy to understand, businesses can make better business decisions related to cyber issues that can affect the bottom line.
Financial scoring is a standard that businesses use to assess financial health. Similarly, cyber scoring can validate the health of a business and improve its ability to make decisions that impact its profitability in various ways.
Having low cyber fidelity essentially means your business could be at higher risk of hackers accessing and stealing important intellectual (and potentially financial) property. Without a mechanism that easily and accurately tells you how secure you are, you could be throwing money away on systems that your business doesn’t need. Cyber scoring provides you with a quantifiable measurement of the cybersecurity of your business, or of a business you are looking to acquire or have within your portfolio now.
The ability to reduce or avoid the impact of an attack gives businesses a major advantage, both financially and reputationally.
For example, most businesses purchase cyber insurance to protect themselves from financial losses caused by cyber attacks. With the rise in significant data breaches, cyber insurers are requiring more and more proof that businesses are taking cybersecurity seriously. Using your cyber score to influence investment decisions in the most meaningful cybersecurity measures may lower costs for acquiring cyber insurance, such as reducing your insurance premiums or increasing the amount in which you are covered.
As consumers and companies are becoming savvier about cybersecurity, businesses are increasingly forced to show their cybersecurity maturity as a differentiator from competitors. Cybersecurity is becoming a large focus in many business deals including contracts, mergers and acquisitions. If you are the acquirer, you can use cyber scoring to uncover the virtual risks and weaknesses of an acquisition of interest. As the entity being acquired, you can be more knowledgeable about where you are on the cybersecurity continuum going into an engagement, and possibly have more control over negotiations.
Now is the time for Cyber Scoring.
Cyber will continue to grow as a factor in financial decision-making. Cyber scoring allows businesses to go beyond “compliance” and use their cybersecurity fitness to better negotiate with insurance companies, mergers and acquisition brokers, auditing companies, or other engagements that require some method of due diligence.
Savvy business leaders are starting to use their cybersecurity investments as a way to leverage business growth and make smarter business investments.
Cyber risk scoring offers a standardized, transparent way to measure cybersecurity across all industries.
Cybersecurity is everyone's business. Just as a borrower’s credit score informs lenders about risk of loaning money, cyber risk scores signal the strength of a company’s cyber defenses. When properly derived, it provides an easy-to-understand and actionable conclusion of a complicated process. There's no better way to find out if an organization can be breached than to ask a hacker.
BreachRisk™ is a family of concepts and solutions designed to fairly, accurately, and repeatably measure the likelihood and impact of cyber threats to an organization from our perspective - the hacker's perspective.