With security budgets tightening and business leaders taking a more watchful eye toward cybersecurity, security operations leaders are increasingly looking to justify their work with key performance indicators. But the question remains: Which metrics matter most?
Earning a seat at the table means talking to business leaders in a language they understand. SecOps leaders must bring objective and relatable measures to the discussion. So let’s dive into the metrics that matter most to our C-suite peers.
The value of business-centered metrics
It’s no longer optional for security leaders to prove their value—it’s an expectation. As top execs across industries take a more critical eye to security spending, CISOs and SecOps leaders must demonstrate how their efforts contribute to the organization’s broader goals. The problem is that many traditional security metrics focus on technical performance rather than business impact. To CEOs focused on achieving business goals, they’re essentially meaningless.
To bridge the gap, SecOps leaders must frame security efforts in terms their fellow executives can understand—connecting messaging and metrics to goals like risk reduction, operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and revenue protection. As security leaders align their KPIs with business priorities, they’ll create greater influence on strategic decision-making.
Of course, this shift in thinking is predicated on strong relationships. CISOs should be proactive in their pursuit of collaboration with business leaders, taking care to position security as an enabler, rather than an—often costly—roadblock. Semi-annual tabletop exercises, where SecOps teams and business leaders spend hours running through various scenarios, can play a key role not only in testing response but in opening an ongoing dialogue. CISOs should use these sessions as an opportunity to educate business leaders on their work and establish KPIs that align with the goals of the business.
Metrics that demonstrate security value
Metrics should reinforce the value of security. But not all are created equal, and SecOps leaders must make sure they bring to the table metrics that align with business goals.
Two of the most critical operational metrics are Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). The former measures the average time it takes to identify a threat within the environment—a lower MTTD signals stronger visibility and alerting capabilities, which reduces the window of opportunity for attackers. MTTR, on the other hand, measures the average time to contain and remediate an incident. A shorter MTTR demonstrates an organization’s ability to swiftly neutralize threats, minimizing potential damage and downtime along the way.
A range of additional objectives are ripe for reporting, depending on the specifics of the company—among them, decreasing the number of critical alerts, reducing phishing incidents, and minimizing on-call fatigue. Business leaders may also be interested in trends related to the severity of alerts and incident resolution. Of course, simply reporting these numbers isn’t enough. They must be framed within a broader narrative that connects security performance to business outcomes. Such as risk to a business unit’s perceived critical components or systems. Or uptime numbers for online systems, against potential downtime based on blocked or remediated issues.
SecOps leaders must make sure their training and education efforts are connected to real numbers, and that they who contextualize those numbers with a compelling story. They could, for example, show how a targeted internal awareness campaign reduced the number of times team members clicked on phishing URLs. This ever-important and evolving communication piece of the role of the CISO ensures key business stakeholders see the value of security investments.
How an MDR can help align security with the business
A managed detection and response (MDR) solution can help organizations do the hard work of aligning security operations with business goals. While many organizations are strapped for time and resources to spend on security, MDRs provide targeted security expertise not only to help identify key reporting metrics, but to provide the support needed to improve metrics over time, thus proving SecOps’ value to the leaders of the business.
When they use an MDR, organizations get access to comprehensive reports that help SecOps leaders track key KPIs. They also gain continuous monitoring, threat intelligence, and expert analysis that go beyond basic reporting. An MDR doesn’t just surface data—it contextualizes trends, identifies patterns, and recommends actionable improvements. That ensures that metrics like critical alerts, phishing attempts, targeted systems and users, and incident response times improve over time, helping organizations reduce risk and strengthen their security posture.
In today’s security environment, CISOs can’t stand pat with the same, siloed approach to security operations. They must do away with overly technical verbiage and metrics and instead connect their work to larger business goals. By leveraging an MDR, security leaders can turn raw data into a compelling security narrative—one that drives investment, improves outcomes, and ultimately earns security a seat at the strategic table.
