There are a variety of metrics that organisations can use to measure their cyber security posture and the effectiveness of their security measures. Some commonly used metrics include:
Threat metrics: These metrics measure the number and types of threats an organisation is facing, such as insider threats, email-based threats, such as phishing or business email compromise, ransomware, or DDoS attacks.
Vulnerability metrics: These metrics measure the number of known vulnerabilities present in an organisation, that may be exploited by a threat. This metric may include the age of the vulnerability, whether it is being actively exploited in the wild and the time it takes to remediate them.
Risk metrics: These metrics measure the overall risk to an organisation, considering the threats and vulnerabilities, as well as any controls used to reduce the resulting risk.
Control metrics: These metrics measure the effectiveness of security controls, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption.
Security awareness metrics: These metrics measure the effectiveness of security awareness training and education for employees. This may include the number of employees completing their security training on time, pass rates, improvements in scores or extend further into behavioural and cultural measures.
Third-party security metrics: These metrics measure the security posture of third-party vendors and partners, including their compliance with relevant regulations and standards.
Incident metrics: These metrics measure the number and severity of security incidents, such as data breaches, that have occurred within an organisation. This also includes measures relating to the effectiveness of the incident response process and the time taken to respond to security incidents.
Compliance metrics: These metrics measure an organisation’s compliance with relevant regulations and standards, such as GDPR, and UK DPA.
Security budget metrics: These metrics measure the return on investment of the security budget, the cost of security incidents, and the cost of compliance.
It's important to note that not all metrics will be relevant to every organisation, and it's important for organisations to choose metrics that align with their specific business goals and objectives. It's also important to regularly review and update the metrics to ensure they remain relevant and accurate.
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