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.