Sarah JamesThe most important KPIs demonstrate how cybersecurity helps a company expand and remain resilient. CISOs and their teams must explain how cybersecurity advances corporate objectives to senior management. Every CISO needs to consistently hone the valuable talent of choosing the KPIs that best capture the value security brings to a business. Data, not anecdotes or stories, are the gold standard for determining how valuable security is to a company.
CISOs obtaining board positions
Fast-track directors, VPs, and C-level executives advancing in their careers in cybersecurity differ in how they link what they are doing to generating commercial value. They don’t rely on the thousands of prepackaged metrics that security systems can generate with a single mouse click. They are, instead, considerably more selective about the metrics they produce and disseminate. A primary focus is to use metrics to enhance endpoint security and demonstrate how it may provide business value.
A growing number of CISOs are being asked to join the board of directors of their companies if they have experience managing and directing cybersecurity strategies to produce business value and quantifiable results.
Metrics guidelines used by CISOs
The most crucial aspect is sticking to measures that help demonstrate integrated value for corporate-wide balanced scorecards. CISOs claim that because balanced scorecards use the same language that CEOs use when addressing their boards, they immediately demonstrate the value of cybersecurity by being able to quantify its contributions to the bottom line.
CISOs also advise the following guidelines when deciding on KPIs to measure the value of cybersecurity to the company.
Use caution when using tool-driven metrics, as they frequently lack context.
Teams working on cybersecurity tend to incorporate more metrics due to the sharp rise in malware-free attacks. Security teams will activate as many metrics as possible in search of hints, seeing more reported data as a solution to escalating dangers that aren’t instantly comprehended. The CISOs’ teams produce an enormous amount of analytics that are uncontextualized by relying on antivirus, SIEM (security information and event management), security ticketing systems, and other tools.
CISOs caution against sharing data directly taken from tools without any explanation. Instead of a list of tactical measures, C-level executives and the boards to which they answer are more interested in novel insights relevant to the current situation.
Maintain a balance between precision, accuracy, and ongoing monitoring
A metric’s context may be defined far more effectively with statistics than it can with anecdotes or stories. CISOs told VentureBeat that tightening metrics’ granularity is a reflexive response to increased attacks and breach attempts. Some CISOs rely on the guardrail of trying to get more accuracy and precision than a measure is intended to offer. As opposed to this, data continuity through time aids in providing context, just what C-level boards desire about cybersecurity investment and performance.
Which cybersecurity metrics matter most?
When cybersecurity experts take on the role of CISO, they focus on creating a quantifiable baseline for security standards and risk management. However, there is growing dependence on rating relative degrees of cyber risk. Cybersecurity providers continue to increase their use of predictive analytics and machine learning. CISOs should begin monitoring activity-based data, such as clock rates on phishing training emails, as they improve training programs and help build a stronger human firewall.
Apply zero trust to cybersecurity
Industrial control systems (ICSs)-dependent processing plants are prime targets for cyber attackers who want to employ low-tech USB devices to infect an entire factory with ransomware. ICS systems used in electrical, petroleum, and power processing industries are not security-focused.
“Physical security and cybersecurity both require zero trust. Therefore, a sound plan for our department works well overall.
Many zero-trust network access (ZTNA) projects are built around PAM and identity access management (IAM), which can offer insight on how cybersecurity benefits a company.
It’s essential to have endpoint threat detection for cybersecurity.
Endpoint attacks are the beginning of almost every potential intrusion or threat activity that an organization encounters. There are 11.7 installed security controls on the average endpoint. They all degrade at a different rates, resulting in numerous attack surfaces.
The 2021 Endpoint Risk Report showed that 52% of endpoints had three or more endpoint management clients installed. 59% had at least one identity access management (IAM) client. Metrics targeted at preventing endpoint attacks are a priority . According to a poll, 55% of cybersecurity experts believe that more than 75% of endpoint attacks cannot be stopped with their present solutions.
Additionally, every time we set up CS for an agency, they consistently give us prompt feedback and excellent outcomes.
Metrics for endpoint visibility help demonstrate security benefits within businesses. The focus should be on tracking open and fixed vulnerabilities by endpoint type, location, and segmentation.
Mean time-to-detect and mean time-to-recover
Both metrics assess the operational effectiveness of security and the degree of coordination between security and other departments. To evaluate how successfully systems detect events, CISOs frequently use mean time-to-detect as a high-level statistic average across industries.
Since mean time-to-recovery isn’t always a security team performance indicator, getting an accurate measurement of it is more complicated. What we can do to help here is make sure that agencies comply with state policies. They call for contingency planning and incident response planning, as well as support with periodic testing and exercising of these plans. So they can be the best prepared to respond to and recover from a significant incident.
Time to put dashboards on a diet
Most dashboards have too many metrics to demonstrate the value that cybersecurity offers to a business. It’s time to take at the dashboards and remove any measure that doesn’t affect endpoint security, growth, or resilience. There are at least a dozen new metric requests for each new widely reported breach. The solution to the breach prevention problem is not to add additional metrics. Having trustworthy, reliable data is.