EU Agency presents 1st report ever on how to measure IT resilience

Business and governments are all reliant on secure networks, but how do you measure the resilience of these networks? The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has published the ’Main Challenges and Recommendations on Network and Service Resilience Metrics’ report, as well as a technical report. These are the first ever eports in Europe to address this area's lack of a holistic review.

Metrics and a measurement framework are essential to the assessment of practices and policies to improve network and service resilience. The desktop research done by ENISA shows that

a) there are very few existing frameworks and not one is globally acceptable;

b) there are no standard practices as different organisations use different sets of baseline metrics and frameworks; and

c) it is difficult to combine or aggregate diverse frameworks in a high-level assessment.

Main challenges

The main resilience metrics challenges include:

• A lack of standard practices across the industry and public sectors;

• Organisations using own-specific approaches and means to measure resilience, if at all;
• Resilience metrics being difficult to deploy due to lack of knowledge and awareness;
• A lack of analysis, long and active co-operation towards  a common understanding and approach;
• The usefulness and value of resilience metrics declining when complexity increases; and 
• A lack of tools and solutions;

The key consensus recommendations are:

• To create a common understanding  and good practice or standard of resilience metrics (Taxonomy, Description and set of baseline metrics, Impact factors);
• To undertake further research on open issues in resilience metrics (Aggregation, Composition, Thresholds, Data Analysis);
• To develop tools and software to automate the deployment of resilience measurements;
• To collect and analyse data;
• To promote good practices and Information sharing; and
• To deploy a conservative approach to introducing metrics (i.e. start with a small set of metrics!)

The technical report is a first step towards building a common understanding, good practices and standards for resilience metrics. It holistically reviews the existing frameworks, models, classification of metrics, and baseline metrics.

 “It is imperative for the Critical Information Infrastructure Protection to be able to accurately measure the security and resilience in Europe,” says Prof. Udo Helmbrecht, Executive Director of ENISA.

A NEW video clip on resilience metrics is available here.

For background EU framework:
Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) Action Plan
Digital Agenda

For full papers; http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/res/other-areas/metrics
For interviews, or further details: Ulf Bergstrom, Spokesman, ENISA, press@enisa.europa.eu, Mobile: + 30 6948 460 143, or Panagiotis Trimintzios, Expert, ENISA, panagiotis.trimintzios Q enisa.europa.eu.