Large Telecom Case Study

The organization is one of the largest communications companies in the U.S. serving thousands of customers across 19 states. As the company continued its rapid rate of growth, data security became an important part of its vision. The company has established a culture of cybersecurity awareness across the entire organization and streamlined its security processes to protect its most valuable assets.

In 2015, the board of directors of this large telecommunications company established a new security operations team and entrusted them with protecting the company’s large digital infrastructure and essential business operations.

To measure success and demonstrate results to the board, the team needed accurate metrics and reports to highlight crucial security findings and remediation steps. The board also wanted to gauge how the company was performing against the competition, and existing tools failed to offer insight into the security performance of other telecommunications companies.

The company’s director of information security was challenged with identifying security threats, managing his team’s response to new issues, and reporting key findings and resolutions to the board. Network scans and penetration tests were expensive and would only provide a static snapshot of their performance. Without a solution that would pinpoint security gaps and assess their entire industry’s performance quickly, it became difficult to identify the most pressing threats and continue to support the company’s rapid growth.

BitSight Security Performance Management delivers independent, data-driven analysis of any organization’s security effectiveness. Unlike time-consuming and expensive network scans or penetration tests, this BitSight SaaS offering continuously analyzes, rates, and observes companies’ security postures, all from outside the network.

BitSight Security Ratings are updated daily and can be customized to focus on specific IP addresses, giving organizations continuous visibility into all levels of their security. This real-time insight empowers organizations to manage risk based on evidence of their current security postures instead of point-in-time network scans.

• Improve the efficiency of identifying and assessing new security risks

• Report performance to the board

• BitSight Security Ratings for Security Performance Management

• Automated security ratings provide continuous insight into the organization’s security posture

• Daily security ratings enable the organization to quantify risk and refocus its resources where they are most needed

• Detailed reports help the company’s information security team measure their program performance and present crucial trends and risks to the board of directors

This large telecommunications company trusts BitSight to deliver accurate and actionable security ratings to help drive their business forward. The company’s security operations team is able to separate their corporate domains from their consumer domains and individually assess the security performance of each. This provides full control and visibility into the true security of their business processes.

The ability to monitor the security of their own networks continuously and analyze important risk vectors, especially around security events such as botnets and malware, has helped the team quickly identify trends and security risks.

“First-thing in the day, my lead security analyst looks at our BitSight Security Rating,” the company’s director of information security explains. “If there is a major change in our rating, we investigate further. This process has helped us identify some key issues we would have otherwise missed.”

If the security team finds a new security issue, the BitSight platform immediately outlines remediation steps to help the team resolve the problem quickly. Knowing which issues require deeper investigation has allowed the team to spend less time chasing false positives and more time working to fix legitimate findings identified through the BitSight platform.

With BitSight Security Ratings for Security Performance Management, this large telecommunications company compares their security performance against the rest of the industry and key competitors. This insight gives the board of directors the confidence to make informed business decisions and, if necessary, increase their investments in data security.

BitSight Security Ratings have given all levels of the organization a simple yet powerful dashboard to improve their understanding of their security performance. BitSight empowers the company’s security operations team to be an important stakeholder for the business and a key part of its continued growth.