Five Incident Response Metrics you Should be Recording

Incident response is a critical aspect of any organization’s security operations. A properly functioning incident response process ensures quick and efficient resolution of disruptions. To effectively manage incident response in a security operations center (SOC), it’s important to clearly understand how well your incident response process performs. This can be achieved by recording and analyzing key metrics that provide insight into the efficiency and effectiveness of incident response efforts. 

No matter the industry or sector you’re in, it’s critical to choose the metrics that make the most sense for your organization. But some incident response metrics – like the five listed below – are relevant to almost every organization:

Five Critical Metrics for Incident Management and Response

Mean time to Detect (MTTD) 

MTTD is a measure of the average time it takes for an organization to detect a security breach or incident. It is often used as a metric to evaluate the effectiveness of an organization’s security monitoring and incident response processes. A shorter MTTD generally indicates that an organization is able to detect security incidents more quickly and respond to them more effectively.

Mean time to Respond (MTTR)

The time it takes to fully resolve an incident or a security concern and restore systems. MTTR is an important metric for measuring the performance of security operations and is used to identify areas for improvement in incident management processes. Over time trends will appear, which provide useful insight into where you need to invest for additional protection, remediation and automation capabilities.

False positive rates

This is the percentage of alerts that upon investigation are revealed to not be valid threats. False positives reduce a security team’s confidence in its tools and draw attention away from serious underlying problems. False positive feedback loops should be included in any incident management process, but enterprises must guard against becoming too lenient; the only thing worse than a false positive is a false negative in which a serious threat is overlooked because a tool was turned down too far.

Detection to decision

The time it takes for an activity to be detected and processed through the system (detection tool, SIEM, etc.) before it reaches an analyst or automated incident response system to determine if action is required.

Decision speed

The time it takes to make a decision – ensuring the alert was not a false positive, escalation or assignment of tasks. It also refers to the speed at which you get all hands on deck to address an alert once it is available to be processed (human or machine). Decisions are made on every alert and are heavily influenced by the number of alerts ahead in the queue and how much additional research an analyst must conduct.

Bonus Incident Management Metric: Security vs. administrative tasks

How much time does your staff spend doing the specialized security tasks you hired them to do?

If these experts spend hours on ticket management, email notification and other non-security work, your enterprise isn’t getting an optimal return on your investment. This incident response metric can be significantly improved by leveraging modern security tools. For instance, security automation platforms can automatically resolve high-volume, low-complexity tasks. The result is higher ROI for security leaders and better work satisfaction for security analysts.

Having a clear understanding of incident response metrics is essential for effectively managing incident response efforts. By recording and analyzing metrics such as MTTR, MTTD, incident resolution rate, incident severity, and RCA, organizations can identify areas for improvement and take steps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of incident management processes.