Cybersecurity Engineering Metrics: SOC Operations Beyond MTTR
· 8 min read
A Security Operations Center running on MTTR alone is measuring the fire, not the fire department. IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 found the average breach takes 258 days to identify and contain, and the teams that broke below 200 days didn't do it by responding faster. They detected earlier and spent less time on toil. MTTR was a side effect, not the target.
Cybersecurity engineering needs its own metric stack. Generic engineering KPIs under-weight the asymmetric cost of a miss, and pure InfoSec dashboards ignore whether the team is burning out or burning budget.