For over a decade, BitSight and similar security rating services (SRS) have promised a simple metric:
📊 One score to summarise third-party cyber risk.
But in 2025, many CISOs and risk teams are asking the same question:
Where’s the value?
The reality is clear:
Legacy risk scores were never built to scale across modern digital supply chains — and cost-saving strategies have only widened the gap.
The Legacy Rating Problem
Security rating services often rely on:
🛰 Promiscuous external scanning — fast but surface-level
📅 Infrequent updates — new exposures take weeks or months to show
🔢 One-size-fits-all scores — a single number, stripped of business context
📉 Economised operations — reduced depth to preserve margin
These factors lead to a risk profile that feels more like an SEO ranking than a security assessment.
And at enterprise scale — where you’re managing hundreds or thousands of vendors — the signal-to-noise ratio collapses.
Why Legacy Scores Fail at Scale
Let’s look at what happens as organisations grow:
🔍 Risk scores lack nuance — The “score” doesn’t differentiate between critical payroll systems and low-risk newsletter platforms
📊 Scores don’t track change — A supplier can improve posture dramatically and still be flagged for old flaws
📪 No prioritisation — Every vendor with a ‘C’ score looks the same, whether it handles PII or not
🕸 Can’t see hidden dependencies — Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers fall out of scope entirely
BitSight might tell you your supplier is a “B” — but what does that mean for your data, your customers, or your regulatory exposure?
It doesn’t say.
The Cost-Cutting Catch
Legacy SRS firms are under pressure:
💰 To keep prices low, they limit scan frequency
⚙️ They don’t run deep asset discovery (too expensive)
🧩 They outsource scoring engines or apply static weighting formulas
🚫 They rarely revisit flagged risks in context of live threat activity
This means:
✅ Lower overheads for the platform
❌ But significantly less value for you
You’re not buying insight.
You’re buying the illusion of oversight.
What Scaling Looks Like with Cyber Tzar
We built Cyber Tzar to scale with your organisation — not just tick boxes.
✅ Live scanning – No stale data, no blind spots
✅ Business-prioritised risk scoring – What actually affects your operations comes first
✅ Integrated threat intelligence – Risk isn’t just an exposure — it’s about likelihood, exploitability, and impact
✅ Supply chain mapping – See beyond Tier 1 into real-world dependencies
✅ Compliance-ready reports – Framework alignment without sacrificing clarity
Replace Ratings With Reality
You don’t need a number.
You need a narrative.
One that tells you:
✅ Where the exposure is
✅ Whether it’s being actively exploited
✅ Who it could hurt
✅ How fast it can be fixed
✅ And what the fix is worth to your risk posture
That’s what Cyber Tzar delivers.
📉 Tired of scores that don’t scale?
📡 Try a live, prioritised supply chain risk scan today — no forms, no assumptions, just signal.
