Respite for SMEs: A Systematic Review of Socio-Technical Cybersecurity Metrics

Abstract

Cybersecurity threats are on the rise, and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) struggle to cope with these developments. To combat threats, SMEs must first be willing and able to assess their cybersecurity posture. Cybersecurity risk assessment, generally performed with the help of metrics, provides the basis for an adequate defense. Significant challenges remain, however, especially in the complex socio-technical setting of SMEs. Seemingly basic questions, such as how to aggregate metrics and ensure solution adaptability, are still open to debate. Aggregation and adaptability are vital topics to SMEs, as they require the assimilation of metrics into an actionable advice adapted to their situation and needs. To address these issues, we systematically review socio-technical cybersecurity metric research in this paper. We analyse aggregation and adaptability considerations and investigate how current findings apply to the SME situation. To ensure that we provide valuable insights to researchers and practitioners, we integrate our results in a novel socio-technical cybersecurity framework geared towards the needs of SMEs. Our framework allowed us to determine a glaring need for intuitive, threat-based cybersecurity risk assessment approaches for the least digitally mature SMEs. In the future, we hope our framework will help to offer SMEs some deserved respite by guiding the design of suitable cybersecurity assessment solutions.