Security Metrics: Replacing Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt

Security Metrics is the first comprehensive best-practice guide to defining, creating, and utilizing security metrics in the enterprise.

Using sample charts, graphics, case studies, and war stories, Yankee Group Security Expert Andrew Jaquith demonstrates exactly how to establish effective metrics based on your organizations unique requirements. Youll discover how to quantify hard-to-measure security activities, compile and analyze all relevant data, identify strengths and weaknesses, set cost-effective priorities for improvement, and craft compelling messages for senior management.

Security Metrics successfully bridges managements quantitative viewpoint with the nuts-and-bolts approach typically taken by security professionals. It brings together expert solutions drawn from Jaquiths extensive consulting work in the software, aerospace, and financial services industries, including new metrics presented nowhere else. Youll learn how to:

Replace nonstop crisis response with a systematic approach to security improvement

Understand the differences between good and bad metrics

Measure coverage and control, vulnerability management, password quality, patch latency, benchmark scoring, and business-adjusted risk

Quantify the effectiveness of security acquisition, implementation, and other program activities

Organize, aggregate, and analyze your data to bring out key insights

Use visualization to understand and communicate security issues more clearly

Capture valuable data from firewalls and antivirus logs, third-party auditor reports, and other resources

Implement balanced scorecards that present compact, holistic views of organizational security effectiveness

Whether youre an engineer or consultant responsible for security and reporting to managementor an executive who needs better information for decision-makingSecurity Metrics is the resource you have been searching for.

Andrew Jaquith, program manager for Yankee Groups Security Solutions and Services Decision Service, advises enterprise clients on prioritizing and managing security resources. He also helps security vendors develop product, service, and go-to-market strategies for reaching enterprise customers. He co-founded @stake, Inc., a security consulting pioneer acquired by Symantec Corporation in 2004. His application security and metrics research has been featured in CIO, CSO, InformationWeek, IEEE Security and Privacy, and The Economist.

Foreword         

Preface            

Acknowledgmen...