A single number to quantify your organization’s risk sounds like an interesting proposition, right? Risk Score, the idea of quantifying the entirety of your organization’s overall risk, is a popular concept in the cybersecurity industry that has been gaining traction over the years. From helping align and focus your mitigation efforts to having a fixed goal of a certain score to maintain, a risk score, along with your vulnerability management tool, can go a long way in protecting your network infrastructure. But should we look to measure cyber risk score vs cyber hygiene score? Let’s find out!
Cyber Risk Score vs Cyber Hygiene Score: What are they?
You might have a decent idea of what a cyber risk score is. But let’s go ahead with the definition one last time!
The Cyber Risk score is a measure of an organization’s vulnerability to potential security risks. By evaluating your organization’s cybersecurity posture and assessing potential weaknesses in your network, a risk score provides a quantitative measure of the potential risk your IT infrastructure might be in.
Cyber Hygiene Score, on the other hand, is the measure of how secure your organization is. It is, simply put, the converse of a cyber risk score. The hygiene score provides a quantitative measure of the security of your IT infrastructure. It’s more like your health score, the higher the better.
So, What’s the Difference Between the Two?
Broadly speaking, the cyber hygiene and risk scores measure a common quantity: your IT infrastructure’s security posture.
However, the biggest difference between the two is that the cyber risk score measures the overall risk, while the cyber hygiene score measures the overall cyber hygiene of the organization.
One other key difference is what the contributors used to calculate the risk or hygiene score. If the score constitutes a limited number of factors, then it does not provide a complete overview of the security posture.
While risk scores usually constitute security risks like vulnerabilities or CVEs, these are not enough to give a complete picture of your organization’s security posture.
Cyber-hygiene score, on the other hand, typically consists of multiple factors like security risks, posture anomalies, missing patches, and more. This provides a more comprehensive look at the state of your security posture and takes the edge over risk scores.
In short, the risk score provides a limited but focused view, while the cyber-hygiene score provides a more comprehensive and broader look at your IT infrastructure.
What are the Benefits of Risk Score and CyberHygiene Score?
The end goal of both cyber-hygiene and risk score is to effectively quantify and assess the attack surface and simplify infrastructure security. But adding to it, both scores provide significant advantages that can take your organization’s security posture to the next level .
- Measure the Impact of your Security Strategies: Remediation is critical to mitigate the detected security risk, and the cyber hygiene/ risk score allows you to measure the impact of the security strategies and remediation policies you have implemented in real-time. This will also help you fine-tune , streamline, and improve the strategies or execute newer, more effective methods for mitigating security risks.
- Ease Compliance Enforcement Process: Reduced attack surface is a direct byproduct of compliance. Compliance improves IT security , and the improved security posture will be reflected in the change in the hygiene/risk score. The change will help you ease the compliance enforcement process and speed it up significantly.
- Streamline and Simplify Risk Communication: Lengthy reports, technical jargon, and complicated graphs make communicating risk with stakeholders and management difficult . A single number demonstrates your ability to combat cyber attacks effectively and makes communicating risks and measuring cyber hygiene simpler.
Risk Score vs Cyber Hygiene Score: Which Should You Choose?
Choosing between cyber-hygiene and risk scores can be difficult, as both can significantly impact your organization’s security. So, it is important to understand what your organization needs and select the right score.
But the cyber-hygiene score, with its broader yet detailed view of IT security, is head and shoulders above others.
While risk score has its benefits, cyber hygiene score is a more advanced and comprehensive method of measuring IT security and its security posture.
Conclusion
Do you have a cybersecurity score set in place? That is the most critical question you must answer before we talk about hygiene/risk score. The impact a cyber-score can have on your organization’s security posture is immense, and you must have it in your IT security arsenal.
And in the dilemma between a risk score vs cyber hygiene score, the cyber hygiene score takes the edge and can be a complete game-changer for IT and Security teams.
P.S. Get the best out of your cyber hygiene score with SanerNow CHS, a comprehensive and advanced scoring system to take your vulnerability management to the next level.
