Benchmark methodology

Benchmarking only helps if the comparison is fair. Forest builds peer cohorts deliberately so that your Industry Score reflects organizations facing conditions like yours, not an arbitrary cross-section of every program in the data.

How cohorts are built

Forest groups organizations by industry and by size band. Industry matters because regulatory pressure and threat profile differ sharply across sectors. Size matters because a small team and a large enterprise operate under different resourcing and complexity, and comparing across that line distorts the result.

Within a cohort, the Forest Intelligence Service computes an average that serves as the comparison baseline. Because FIS is deterministic, the same cohort and the same inputs always produce the same benchmark, and every comparison can be traced back to the values that formed it.

How to read the result

Your standing is expressed as a comparison against the cohort average. The difference is a peer delta, a performance difference rather than a deficiency in your program. Use it to find where you lead or trail relative to similar organizations, then decide whether that position is acceptable given your own targets.

Cohort comparisons describe the group, not any individual member. You cannot infer a specific peer's posture from the average, by design.

Why it matters

A well-constructed cohort tells you whether a low score reflects your program or your sector. The privacy controls that make cohort participation safe are covered in peer comparison privacy.