A business wants to hire a vendor. However, this vendor does not meet policy standards and has requested an exception. The question you face is whether or not to approve or deny that exception request. What’s good for business sometimes comes with added risk. In fact, many incidents are the direct result of a policy violation. For risk management, and business needs, maybe the answer isn’t a simple yay or nay but a more nuanced approach.
UpGuard CyberRisk enables organizations to control and monitor third-party vendor risk in real-time and improve their security posture. Since we launched CyberRisk, our team has been speaking to users and evolved the platform into two new modules, BreachSight and VendorRisk. Combined with a redesigned user experience, UpGuard is easier to use than ever.
With the constant barrage of headlines regarding breaches in the last few years, it seems that society in general has become numb to losing personal data. This year’s overarching cybersecurity theme is clear: We’re all in this together because we simply can’t do it alone. Effective defense demands a team effort where employees, enterprises, and end users alike recognize their shared role in reducing cybersecurity risks.
Your primary systems aren’t the only source of damaging exposed credentials. Third-party applications employed by your organization also have privileged logins that must be protected. Cloud platforms, software as a service (SaaS), and local third party applications such as ERP systems often have administrative logins with full control.
The definition of “operational risk” is variable but it generally covers the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events. I, however, want to re-examine this general definition, so that the definition of operational risk takes into account all the cybersecurity-related risks that are currently plaguing organizations today. With the current definition, one cannot quantify internal processes and people.
If you’re involved in IT risk or security, you’ve probably encountered BitSight. It is one of a wave of promised solutions to a growing problem: how to manage the risks posed by your IT vendors in the cloud. The legacy approach to solving this problem is a combination of spreadsheet-based vendor assessments, sporadic penetration tests and vulnerability scans. If you combine this with subjective measurement and scoring of risk, you are probably taking on a lot more risk than you should.
The specialized nature of cyber risk requires the translation of technical details into business terms. Security ratings and cyber risk assessments serve this purpose, much like a credit score does for assessing the risk of a loan. But the methodologies employed by solutions in this space vary greatly, as do their results.
Microsoft’s enterprise software powers the majority of large environments. Though often hybridized with open source solutions and third party offerings, the core components of Windows Server, Exchange, and SQL Server form the foundation of many organizations’ data centers. Despite their prevalence in the enterprise, Microsoft systems have also carried a perhaps unfair reputation for insecurity, compared to Linux and other enterprise options.
