What is a Security Posture Score?

Understanding your security posture score is a proactive approach to managing cybersecurity risks, demonstrating compliance, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement within your organization. Many individual factors contribute to an organization’s cybersecurity readiness and overall security posture. Organizations may use different methodologies to calculate their security posture score, and various tools and frameworks are available to assist in this assessment process. In this post, we’ll help familiarize you with what goes into a security posture score.

What is a Cybersecurity Rating?

Just as credit reports or FICO scores quantitatively measure an individual’s credit risk, security ratings aim to do the same with organizations’ cyber risk. A cybersecurity rating or security posture score is a numerical representation that assesses an organization’s overall cybersecurity strength and readiness. It provides a way to measure and communicate the effectiveness of an organization’s security measures, infrastructure, and practices. 

How is Security Posture Calculated? 

Calculating a security posture involves assessing various aspects of an organization’s cybersecurity measures and practices. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula, but there are general steps that organizations often take:

• Security Policies and Procedures: Evaluation of the existence and effectiveness of security policies and procedures within an organization.
• Network Security: Analysis of the security measures implemented to protect the organization’s network infrastructure from unauthorized access and attacks.
• Endpoint Security: Assessment of the security measures in place for individual devices such as computers, laptops, and mobile devices.
• Data Protection: Evaluation of how well sensitive data is protected, including measures like encryption and access controls.
• Incident Response: Analysis of an organization’s ability to detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity incidents.
• Security Awareness Training: Assessment of the level of awareness and training that your organization provides employees on cybersecurity best practices.
• Patch Management: Evaluation of the organization’s process for keeping software and systems up-to-date with the latest security patches.
• Vendor Risk Management: Assessment of the security measures in place for managing and mitigating risks associated with third-party vendors.
• Security Monitoring and Logging: Analysis of the systems in place to monitor and log security events for proactive threat detection.
• Compliance with Regulations: Evaluation of the organization’s adherence to relevant cybersecurity regulations and standards.

Many tools, frameworks, and third parties can assist you in calculating a security rating or cybersecurity posture score. Different providers of security consultation and rating services utilize various proprietary algorithms. 

• UpGuard, one of the most popular security ratings platforms, calculates cybersecurity scores from 0-950.
• BitSight Security Ratings uses a scale of 250-900, but the current effective range is 300-820, with the upper and lower extremes reserved for future use.
• For organizations reliant on Microsoft 365 products and services, Microsoft Secure Score measures their security posture as 0-100 percent. 
• Security Scorecard, well-regarded by peer review platforms like Gartner Peer Insights, communicates its security ratings in the universally understood A to F educational scale.

Why Employ Security Posture Scores?

Cybersecurity posture scores help provide a high-level overview of an organization’s security status, giving internal stakeholders and potential partners a better understanding of the entity’s cyber strengths or areas for improvement. Many organizations use cybersecurity posture scores to continuously improve and demonstrate their security commitment to customers, partners, or regulatory bodies. 

Security ratings are a popular element of third-party risk management (TPRM) strategies or cyber insurance underwriting, helping organizations better manage vendors’ cybersecurity performance while supplementing other time-consuming risk assessment techniques during procurement or onboarding.

Increasing your organization’s cybersecurity posture is a fluid and continually ongoing process. Obtaining a third-party posture score or security rating can help give an updated overview of progress, reassuring or informing stakeholders of security strengths and weaknesses. The RAMPxchange marketplace can help organizations connect and collaborate as they seek new ways to measure and strengthen their security posture. Contact RAMPxchange to learn more and join our growing coalition of cyber defenders.