The first step in building your enterprise cybersecurity metrics and security operations KPIs is setting clear direction as to what you're collecting and why. You’ll need true vision and stakeholder buy-in on a defined path forward. Visit - https://www.siemplify.co/

1. CyberSecurity
Metrics
Building a Holistic Metrics Program

2. Introduction
An organization's ability to discover
and reduce risk in a more
preventative manner rests heavily
on having clear cybersecurity and
security operations metrics.
Understanding the overall security
posture of your enterprise is
determined by creating a baseline of
select organizational and security
operations metrics.

3. “Establishing organizational and
security operations metrics
improves management and
reduces company risk”

4. How CyberSecurity Metrics Work
With baseline numbers established, you can then begin
to increase visibility, education, and improvement to
both technology and processes within your program.
Metrics should be garnered from critical assets with risks
and improvements presented to key stakeholders within
the organization.
These metrics help determine where particular areas of a
program are running smoothly and where additional
insight should be applied.

5. Defining CyberSecurity Metrics
These are the areas where you should be building metrics
first. Ultimately, you're looking to measure your ability to
effectively and proactively secure your company's most
valuable assets.
Determining what information to collect and how you'll
gather and analyze this data is a crucial step in your metrics
journey. You'll also want to gut-check your identified metrics
with a risk-based team, if available, to determine
prioritization of the remediation efforts when those needs
arise.

6. Baselines For Goal Settings
Creating baselines is what you’ll use to determine the current
cyberSecurity maturity of your organization overall as well
as your SOC. Baselines also help you identify any outliers or
blatant concerns which require urgent attention. By creating
this foundation and setting standards reflecting what’s
normal within your organization, you create a basis for
setting goals and milestones.

7. How To Set An Effective Goal
To set this as an effective goal, you would need to have
already done the following:
● Baseline the current state of your patching performance -
what is the current time frame for new patches to be
applied?
● Understand your organization's risk tolerance - how long
are unpatched systems acceptable?
Only by understanding these elements can you determine if a
one-week patching window is actually a good, reasonable,
achievable goal.

8. Strong CyberSecurity Metrics Program
The first step in building your enterprise cybersecurity
metrics and security operations KPIs is setting clear
direction as to what you're collecting and why. You’ll need
true vision and stakeholder buy-in on a defined path forward.
Throughout my career, I've seen groups attempt to get
stakeholder approval first - without having a plan, vision and
long-term strategy.

9. Analyze & Improve Cybersecurity
Metrics
The reports should be sent to stakeholders with a clear
representation of what’s being measured, its priority, what its
baseline was and how it’s changed over time. Producing these
reports requires analysis to get a full understanding of the
numbers have the ability to explain progress, shortfalls and
fluctuations. The ability to automate incident response
and remediation processes can limit skewed metrics,
streamline reporting, improve predictability and allows for
better data hygiene when speaking with stakeholders.

10. Conclusion
Metrics are an important part of your cybersecurity and
security operations programs and being able to measure your
progress shows how well your security program is
functioning. Having key stakeholders brought to review your
vision and strategy will assist with getting other teams to
cooperate in your data collection. The more you can
automate metric collection as well as in broader security
automation processes, the quicker you can respond and
produce reports.