The Flaws of Outside-In Monitoring

Traditional cybersecurity monitoring solutions such as BitSight, SecurityScorecard, and RiskRecon focus heavily on outside-in risk assessment—evaluating a company’s cybersecurity posture based on external factors like open ports, exposed vulnerabilities, and website hygiene. While this is an important layer of security, it is incomplete and often misleading, especially for software vendors. These scores fail to account for the internal measures that truly safeguard a software product’s security throughout its lifecycle. They give a snapshot but not a comprehensive view of a vendor's overall risk profile.

The Need for Inside-Out Validation

To complement outside-in assessments, insurers and organizations need inside-out security validation. This means having a real-time, internal view of an organization’s product security program. Traditional external scans do not provide insights into critical aspects such as:

• Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): Tracking vulnerabilities and security risks across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Continuous monitoring of the security posture of cloud environments, ensuring configurations and cloud infrastructure are secure.
• Product-Centric Risk Scoring: Going beyond perimeter-based evaluations to assess how well internal security measures are working within the actual software product environment.

This is where Start Left® Security steps in. By providing a comprehensive inside-out security score, Start Left® offers a complete picture of a vendor’s security posture, spanning both ASPM and CSPM. Our platform enables cyber insurers and organizations to move beyond superficial compliance checks and gain real insights into the effectiveness of a company’s internal security practices. 

How Cyber Insurers Can Lead with Inside-Out Security

Cyber insurers hold the power of the purse, and with that power, they can influence the security practices of the organizations they underwrite. Instead of relying solely on outside-in monitoring, insurers can demand deeper insights into a company’s security performance, which involves:

• Risk Scoring based on actual internal security metrics, including how effectively vulnerabilities are identified, prioritized, and mitigated.
• Security Validation that combines both outside-in and inside-out perspectives to provide a more holistic view of risk.
• Continuous Monitoring of both application security and cloud security, ensuring that organizations are not just compliant but actively managing their risks in real-time.

By integrating Start Left®’s inside-out security validation with traditional outside-in tools, insurers can proactively assess and mitigate risks long before a breach occurs, thereby reducing claims and safeguarding their bottom line.

Closing the Gap Between Compliance and Security

Cyber insurers are in a unique position to push the industry toward a proactive, security-first model. By embracing both outside-in and inside-out security evaluations, they can help organizations not only meet compliance requirements but also ensure they are truly secure. This shift is crucial for industries that rely heavily on software vendors, as even a small vulnerability can have devastating ripple effects, as seen with SolarWinds.

Start Left® Security provides the platform to enable this shift, helping organizations adopt product-centric security practices that embed security from day one, ensuring both resilience and compliance.