What Cybersecurity Metrics and KPIs Need to Be Tracked?

The main reason to track cybersecurity metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) on an ongoing basis is to understand the business’s exposure to security risks. Tracking these metrics provides a historical view of the security events that have occurred and where they happened, as well as how effectively security tools, processes, and teams are functioning, according to a blog post by TechTarget.

These are some of the cybersecurity metrics and KPIs that businesses should be tracking:

1. Collecting data on the number and rate of security incidents over specific periods will help Legal Ops professionals, CISOs, and other cybersecurity leaders ensure that the defenses put in place are protecting the organization’s digital assets.

2. Understanding the severity level of a cyber intrusion or data theft will help in prioritizing actions to make sure that high-severity incidents don’t recur. 

3. Tracking incident response times lets Legal Ops and cybersecurity professionals see how effective their teams are at responding to alerts and getting to work on threats. 

4. Remediation time is the speed at which malware or another identified threat can be isolated, quarantined, and completely removed. 

5. One of the best ways to protect business-critical software is to patch operating systems and applications as soon as bug fixes become available from vendors. 

6. Vulnerability scanning tools run tests against systems and user devices to see if they are patched against known vulnerabilities and can identify other potential security issues. The resulting information may be used along with the metric on patch response times to identify whether more resources should be allocated.

7. Cybersecurity “housekeeping” involves a series of audits, assessments, penetration tests, and other checks to ensure that security processes and tools are working as expected. 

Understanding that the evolution of the business will affect what’s strategically important should guide the process of creating goals and choosing appropriate metrics and KPIs to track.