IT Security Metrics Scorecard: Simple Ways For Leaders to Track Performance and Risk

If you lead a mid-market company, your IT and security spend probably looks big, messy, and hard to judge. You get reports, maybe some dashboards, but you still wonder: is this good, bad, or just expensive?

The real question is not how many numbers you track. It is which few numbers tell you if IT and security are supporting growth, protecting the business, and controlling cost.

In other words, when you ask yourself, “What metrics should I use to measure the performance of our IT and security function?” you are really asking, “How do I connect all this technology to uptime, risk, and delivery in a way my board will accept?”

This article offers a practical, board-ready scorecard. A small set of IT and security metrics that fit on one page, can be reviewed monthly, and finally give you a clear answer: are we getting the return we should from technology and cybersecurity?

Start with the question: what should IT and security be doing for your business?

Before you pick metrics, you need a simple view of what IT and security exist to do.

At a business level, IT and security have four jobs:

1. Keep the business running.
2. Keep data and customers safe.
3. Control and explain technology cost.
4. Deliver change on time, without chaos.

If a metric does not connect to one of these outcomes, it probably belongs in a technical playbook, not in your executive scorecard.

Think of IT as the engine room of your company. You care that the engine runs, does not catch fire, is fuel-efficient, and can handle a long trip at higher speed. You do not need to see every sensor on every part of the engine.

External research on mid-market KPI design backs this up. High-performing firms pick a small set of measures that tie directly to strategy and ignore the rest. For a helpful overview, see how middle-market companies use KPIs to drive higher performance in this ZS article on KPI focus.

That same mindset should guide your IT and security scorecard.

Translate business goals into simple IT and security outcomes

Start with your current goals. Maybe they sound like this:

• “We cannot afford outages during peak season.”
• “Our brand must be trusted by lenders and partners.”
• “We need better margins from the current team and tools.”
• “We have to ship projects on time or growth stalls.”

Now translate those into clear IT and security outcomes:

• Reliable operations become fewer outages, shorter downtime, and faster fixes.
• A trusted brand becomes fewer successful attacks and stronger proof of controls.
• Margin goals become clear cost per user and smarter spend on vendors.
• Growth goals become predictable project delivery and safe changes.

This step blocks vanity metrics. For example, “number of tickets closed” sounds productive, but it does not tell you if people can actually work, if the root cause is solved, or if risk is dropping.

Every metric you track should answer a simple business question, such as:

• “How often are we down?”
• “How fast do we fix the big problems?”
• “How exposed are we if something bad happens?”
• “Are we getting value for what we spend?”

Keep your scorecard short, clear, and easy to explain to the board

Aim for 8 to 12 metrics total, across IT and security, that fit on a single page.

Each metric should pass a simple test. In one sentence, you or your IT lead can explain:

1. What this number tells us.
2. What “good” and “bad” look like.
3. What we will do if it moves the wrong way.

If your CIO or MSP cannot do that, the metric is too technical for the board.

Many mid-market executives find it helpful to pair their scorecard with a short KPI framework. Resources like Apptio’s guide to core IT metrics and KPIs can help you sanity check your list, while you keep your own version focused on your strategy, not on every possible IT statistic.

Core IT performance metrics every mid-market company should track

You do not need a fancy tool to start. A spreadsheet with a few well-chosen IT metrics, reviewed every month, is enough to spot trends and drive better questions.

Here is a simple, opinionated set to consider.

Reliability: uptime, downtime, and mean time to resolve incidents (MTTR)

Reliability metrics answer, “Can people do their jobs when they need to?”

• System uptime is the percent of time key systems are working.
• Downtime is the flip side, the hours or minutes they are not.
• Mean time to resolve (MTTR) is how long it takes, on average, to fix an outage or major incident from the moment it is reported.

If your main order system has a 3-hour MTTR, that means a typical outage costs you three hours of lost work, angry customers, and delayed revenue. If it fails four times in a month, that is half a workday gone.

Over time, you want higher uptime and lower MTTR. Those numbers tie straight to employee productivity, customer experience, and sales you might never see again.

Service quality: help desk response, first-call resolution, and SLA performance

Service metrics answer, “Do people trust IT to help them?”

Key measures:

• Help desk response time, how long it takes to answer or pick up a ticket.
• First-call resolution rate, the percent of issues fixed on the first contact.
• SLA met percentage, how often IT meets its promised response and fix times.

A team that answers fast but bounces tickets around or gives weak fixes will show low first-call resolution and lower SLA performance. Over time, staff will stop reporting issues or find risky workarounds.

Watch the mix of ticket volume and user satisfaction. Rising tickets with falling satisfaction usually mean poor user experience, weak training, or a broken process upstream.

Cost and efficiency: cost per ticket and IT spend per employee

You do not just care about speed and quality. You care about the bill.

• Cost per ticket is total support cost divided by the number of tickets in a period.
• IT spend per employee is total IT spend divided by headcount.

Cost per ticket helps you compare your internal team against an MSP or a new tool. IT spend per employee is a quick way to compare your investment level to peer data, such as the ranges shared in this KPI e-guide for mid-market organizations.

Cost metrics should never be read alone. A low cost per ticket with poor uptime and angry users is a “cheap but broken” environment. The goal is a healthy balance: controlled cost, strong reliability, and good service.

Delivery and change: on-time project delivery and change success rate

This pair of metrics shows if IT can support growth without breaking things.

• On-time project delivery rate is the percent of projects that finish by the agreed date and within budget.
• Change success rate is the percent of changes (releases, upgrades, new systems) that do not cause outages, rollbacks, or emergency fixes.

If your team ships fast but breaks production often, growth will stall. If they avoid change to protect uptime, innovation dies.

Healthy IT functions improve both numbers over time. They plan better, test better, and communicate better, so the business can adopt new tools, new products, and even AI use cases without constant disruption.

Security metrics that show real risk, not just activity

Security metrics should answer a blunt question: “How likely are we to suffer a serious incident, and how bad would it be?”

Executives do not need to see every alert. They need a short set of outcome-focused metrics that they can explain to a lender, a major customer, or a board member without a security degree. If you want a broader view of how boards think about cyber measurement, this CPA Journal piece on security metrics and maturities offers useful context.

Here are four groups that work well in mid-market firms.

Threat exposure: critical vulnerabilities and time to remediate

Think of vulnerabilities as unlocked doors and open windows in your systems.

Track:

• Number of unresolved critical vulnerabilities.
• Average time to remediate a critical vulnerability.
• Count of high-risk issues older than 30 days.

That last one is especially board-friendly. “We have 12 critical issues older than 30 days” is easy to grasp.

A strong security function shrinks both the count and the age of critical issues over time, even as new ones appear.

Protection and coverage: asset visibility and security control deployment

You cannot protect what you cannot see.

Key coverage metrics:

• Percent of devices with endpoint protection.
• Percent of users with multi-factor authentication.
• Percent of critical systems backed up and tested.

Also ask, “How many devices, accounts, and applications do we track in total?” If that number jumps around, your asset inventory is weak and any other security number may be misleading.

Incident readiness: mean time to detect and respond to security events

Here you care about two clocks:

• Mean time to detect (MTTD), how long it takes to notice a real security incident.
• Mean time to respond (MTTR), how long it takes to contain and clean it up.

Shorter detection and response times usually mean smaller breaches, less data loss, and lower legal or reputational damage.

The raw number of alerts is less important at the board level. Focus your scorecard on how fast and how well the team handles the important ones.

Compliance and behavior: training completion, phishing rates, and audit findings

Many mid-market firms now face detailed questions from regulators, large customers, or cyber insurers. People metrics help you answer them.

Track:

• Percent of staff who complete annual security training.
• Phishing simulation click rate over time.
• Number of open high-risk audit or compliance findings.

You want training completion up, phishing clicks down, and high-risk findings closed on a clear timeline. Better behavior metrics almost always lead to fewer real incidents.

Conclusion: turn IT and security from a black box into a scorecard

When you pull this together, you have a simple answer to “What metrics should I use to measure the performance of our IT and security function?” You track reliability, service quality, cost, delivery, and security risk, in a way that fits on one page and makes sense to any board member.

Start small. Pick a draft set of 8 to 12 metrics, set clear targets, and review them every month with your IT and security leaders. Use the trends, not just the snapshots, to guide where you invest, what you stop doing, and which vendors you challenge.

If you want help building a scorecard your board will trust, visit https://www.ctoinput.com to see how fractional CTO, CIO, and CISO support can connect these metrics to your growth plan. To go deeper on technology, security, and executive scorecards, explore related articles on the CTO Input blog at https://blog.ctoinput.com.