Biblio

Existing security technologies play a significant role in protecting enterprise systems but they are no longer enough on their own given the number of successful cyberattacks against businesses and the sophistication of the tactics used by attackers to bypass the security defences. Security measurement is different to security monitoring in the sense that it provides a means to quantify the security of the systems while security monitoring helps in identifying abnormal events and does not measure the actual state of an infrastructure's security. The goal of enterprise security metrics is to enable understanding of the overall security using measurements to guide decision making. In this paper we present a reference architecture for aggregating the measurement values from the different components of the system in order to enable stakeholders to see the overall security state of their enterprise systems and to assist with decision making. This will provide a newer dimension to security management by shifting from security monitoring to security measurement.