Effective security programs must demonstrate measurable business value by reducing risk and contributing to revenue growth or cost reduction. Key performance indicators and key risk indicators provide the framework for tracking and communicating that value to organizational leadership.
Measuring Security Program Value
With all of this we're setting up a program, a program that's going to manage risk for the organization. We should be improving the organization — but how do we measure that?
Ultimately a business is there to make profit. There are other things that a business might try to do, but for most businesses the primary goal is to turn some sort of profit, and they do that by either increasing revenue or decreasing costs. That's what we should be doing within our organization. That's what a security program should be doing: it should be increasing revenue or decreasing costs.
Now, there are times that we are working on projects where it's hard to see how we're increasing revenue or decreasing costs. When you're talking about things like improving scalability, reliability and availability, it is a little bit further detached from our revenue, let's say. But in this case, when we create reliability and availability, it improves our customer rating, and therefore hopefully we gain more sales. Also, with scalability we're making things more manageable, and when we make things manageable it should decrease costs. So ultimately it should really render down into some sort of measurable where we're either increasing revenue or decreasing costs.
One reason why we should be thinking in these terms of profitability, and why we're increasing revenue and decreasing costs, is because these are business terms. These are what the people in charge of the company and upper management are thinking about. So if we start analyzing things from these perspectives, we'll start speaking their terms and be able to approve more projects that we want to get through, because it has a return on investment, it has a value to the company.
One way we can show value to the company is by having and tracking some sort of KPIs and KRIs. KPIs are key performance indicators, the things that we can show that yes, these are the things that are improving because we're investing in these areas. And key risk indicators: it's like an insurance program. A lot of what we're doing is like an insurance program, and we should see risk decrease because of that. So if we are implementing things correctly, we should see a decrease in risk indicators. So figuring out how we can measure that and implement that to show our value, and be able to show why we need to continue to improve things and work on our security projects and work on our security department.
Ultimately, with the efforts that we're making, we want to show that we're making improvements, whether that is that we're improving the quality in what we're delivering, or we're decreasing the number of incidents that we have. So we figure out what we're going to measure, and then we can do some sort of trend analysis.
Ultimately, a strong security program and strong security operations is critical to businesses nowadays. Those businesses who don't take the proper steps in implementing security are going to fall behind the curve. Customers are demanding more and more from the vendors that they use, and if your company falls behind, they could see a loss in revenue.
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