From Alerts to Action: Quantifying Cloud Risk with Wiz & WWT
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How do you explain a $2 million security risk in a 5-minute board meeting? This common challenge is exactly the problem the Wiz/WWT partnership solves.
Why this changes the game
Security leaders are under more scrutiny than ever to demonstrate the business value of cybersecurity investments. But traditional metrics, like criticality scores or vulnerability counts, rarely translate into language that business executives understand. Moreover, remediation efforts may not adequately prioritize more critical elements of the business in favor of addressing "low-hanging fruit" first. This disconnect often leaves CISOs fighting for funding with no clear information to show what's at stake.
By assigning financial values to Wiz issues, misconfigurations and control gaps, Wiz and WWT help organizations shift from abstract risk discussions to concrete, dollar-based impact analysis. WWT's unique approach to prioritizing Wiz's issues translates technical risks into precise dollar values, empowering organizations to prioritize remediation efforts based on financial impacts and maximize the return on investment from their security programs.
WWT integrates the X-Analytics cyber risk analytics engine into our proprietary QRA framework to bring unmatched financial clarity to cyber risk decisions. X-Analytics quantifies loss exposure based on fully transparent and industry-validated methods, enabling WWT to translate financial exposure insights and mitigation actions into board-ready guidance, prioritized action plans and tailored investment strategies.
The result? Security teams can finally prioritize the issues that matter most. Not just from a technical standpoint, but from a business one. This empowers CISOs to make smarter investment decisions, justify their budgets with confidence, and move beyond fear-based conversations to conversations using a value-driven strategy.
The CISO's dilemma: More risk, less budget
Security leaders continue to face challenges in securing funding for cybersecurity initiatives due to the difficulty in demonstrating a clear return on investment (ROI). Unlike other business initiatives that show tangible and immediate benefits, cybersecurity investments provide value through risk mitigation and long-term protection, which are harder to quantify. Because of this, security leaders often rely on fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to justify their budget requests, placing them at a disadvantage when competing with other initiatives during the budget cycle.
Dollars and decisions: Using Wiz and quantified risk to drive remediation actions
With these benefits in mind, WWT has established a partnership with Wiz to offer a quantitative risk analysis (QRA) service for security leaders looking to address the root causes of their issues. Quantifying risk involves a detailed analysis of the data, systems and applications within the business protected by Wiz.
WWT can begin to paint an accurate picture of quantified risk to the business by understanding the organization's financial state, including the value of its data and the financial impact of loss, disclosure or alteration, the criticality of systems, and the functionality of applications.
WWT's QRA service seeks to:
Understand cyber risk in monetary terms
WWT incorporates Wiz's issues into the model and assigns dollar values to issues, control breakdowns, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. By quantifying risk exposures in terms of expected losses, organizations gain a clearer understanding of where to focus resources for the greatest impact.
Model remediation impact
The service enables organizations to model improvements in remediating Wiz issues, control breakdowns, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to show how much risk will be reduced in terms of dollars by taking these actions. This helps organizations to begin remediating the root cause of the issues versus constantly fixing tactical items that are a symptom of a bigger issue. This approach replaces guesswork with actionable data, ensuring money invested in cybersecurity drives measurable improvements in overall cybersecurity risk.
Enable data-driven investments
With a comprehensive cyber risk exposure dashboard, clients can visualize their total cyber exposure, model various loss events such as ransomware, track the impact of mitigation efforts, and benchmark performance against industry standards. This dashboard offers clarity and transparency, allowing for more confident investment decisions and aligning security strategies with broader business objectives.
Turn Wiz Issues into Financial Wins
Transforming Wiz issues into actionable, quantifiable insights
By translating Wiz issues into financial outcomes, WWT helps organizations move beyond technical severity scores to financially quantified risk assessments. This approach allows security leaders to communicate risks to non-technical stakeholders in terms of business impact, fostering greater alignment and understanding.
Optimizing investments for maximum impact
Quantitative modeling of Wiz's issues highlights the most impactful remediation actions, directing investments in strategies that yield the highest risk reduction per dollar spent. This ensures that security budgets are used efficiently, strengthening resilience while minimizing costs.
Key outputs
WWT's integrated QRA service delivers powerful outputs that drive informed decision-making to help organizations prioritize their Wiz issues:
- Cyber risk exposure dashboard: Shows the amount of cyber risk broken down by control domain and loss event type.
- Prioritized recommendations: Targeted Wiz finding remediation actions based on financial impact and ROI.
- Remediation impact modeling: Shows the dollar amount of risk reduction realized based on the organization addressing Wiz issues, misconfigurations and control breakdowns.
Make every security dollar count
Together, WWT and Wiz partnership help organizations begin addressing the root causes of their issues using a quantitative risk analysis, representing a significant shift in cybersecurity decision-making. By translating technical risks into financial impacts, organizations get the clarity and confidence needed to prioritize investments, improve resilience and align cybersecurity strategies with broader business objectives. With WWT's structured approach, clients can navigate the complexities of modern cyber threats and emerge stronger, smarter and more secure. Please reach out to your WWT account team or Cory Deeter, global leader of the WWT Wiz services practice.