16 Cybersecurity KPIs to Add to Your Security Dashboard

Cybersecurity professionals are used to looking at real-time numbers from their SIEM software, security ratings platform, incident prevention system, and other cyber risk solutions. These products each come with their own security dashboard, giving IT, risk, and security personnel quick (or not, depending on the UI) access to the information they need to do their jobs effectively.

However, the data displayed by security-specific solutions is sometimes very technical in nature, and doesn’t provide a complete picture of risk. With less-technically skilled individuals on the Board and in the C-suite taking on an increasingly significant role in cybersecurity oversight, it’s often useful to provide more straightforward, aggregated information in your security report to the board. Numbers that are easy for everyone to understand and communicate the broad spectrum of cyber risk a company is facing help users save time and energy.

We’ve compiled 16 valuable, easy-to-understand cybersecurity and cyber risk KPIs that can be integrated into a security dashboard for any member of an organization who wants to become more aware of cyber risk. These metrics come from a variety of sources and indicate risks caused by technical issues, security diligence, human behavior, and more.

You’ll notice we’ve included a fair amount of KPIs that can be found on the BitSight Security Ratings Platform. Our platform is designed to help security and risk eaders quantify cyber risk, and therefore provides several metrics that are useful for the purposes laid out above. However, BitSight is by no means the only source of at-a-glance cyber risk data.

Easy-to-Understand Cybersecurity KPIs

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01 Security Rating

A BitSight Security Rating is a metric for describing overall cybersecurity performance based on externally observable indicators that come from a variety of trustworthy sources. The rating is informed by data from over 120 sources on compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches.
BitSight Security Ratings Platform
The BitSight Security Rating for an organization, which is presented as a number from 250 to 900, indicates overall security performance. It also gives the user a sense of their likelihood of experiencing a data breach; companies with a BitSight Security Rating of 500 or lower are nearly five times more likely to experience a breach than those with a rating of 700 or higher.
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