30 December 2014

Intranet stats - a neglected security metric

Most organizations of any size have a corporate intranet and I suspect you, dear reader, have an information or IT security website on yours.

Are you tracking the page views?

The count, or rather the trend in the number of page views for the security site can be an interesting, useful, perhaps even PRAGMATIC metric in its own right.

Take this very blog for example. Google kindly tracks and conveniently provides the admins with page view statistics in the form of little blue graphs. Google's default stats view shows the daily page counts for the present month, something like this:

Given the specialist nature of security metrics and our relatively narrow (distinguished, enlightened and very welcome!) readership, the default graph is too peaky, whereas it is a little easier to identify trends from the monthly version:


Pulling further back, the aggregated annual stats follow a pretty clear pattern which we've picked out by eye in red just in case you missed it:
The book had not even been printed when we launched this blog back in 2012. Interest peaked when it was published in January 2013, then declined gently until a few months ago when we are delighted to report that the upward trend resumed quite strongly - a second wave maybe.

Of course in spotting the second wave we might be exhibiting 'confirmation bias', one of many biases noted in the book, and if it mattered we really ought to consult a qualified statistician to analyze the numbers scientifically rather than 'by eye' ... but this is merely an illustration, and 'by eye' is good enough for our purposes. We're plenty patient enough to wait the months it will take to determine whether the apparent upward trend turns out to be genuine or just wishful thinking!

Turning now to your intranet security site, page counts like these are just one of a wide variety of statistics that the intranet webserver almost certainly tracks for you. Most webservers record far more information in their logs, while if you choose to go that route, dedicated tracking and analytical applications (such as Google Analytics for publicly-accessible sites at least) offer a bewildering array of statistics concerning things such as the pages visited, time spent on each page, website assets downloaded, the sequence of pages visited, browser versions, visitor locations and more. True, some of those details can be witheld or faked by the more security-conscious or paranoid visitors, but that's even less likely on an intranet than on the WWW so can be safely ignored in this context.

The big question, as always, is "Which metrics are actually worth the effort?" It costs real money to gather, anlyze, present and consider metrics, so as with any other business activity, they need to earn their keep. Figuring out the answer, as always, involves first understanding the organization's goals or objectives for the intranet site, then elaborating on the questions arising, then identifying potential metrics, and finally down-selecting a few cost-effective metrics using an approach such as PRAGMATIC.

It can be quite interesting and useful to elaborate on the objectives for an intranet site, although we seldom bother, while the questions arising are equally revealing.  One might well ask, for example:
  • What constitutes a successful security intranet site?  How do we define success?  What are we trying to achieve?
  • What proportion of employees visit the site over the course of, say, a year?
  • Which parts of the site are the most or least popular ... and why?
  • Which pages are the most or least "sticky" or engaging ... and why? 
  • How does information security's intranet site stack up against other business departments?
  • Do visits to the site reflect awareness and training initiatives, or incidents, or something else (can we explain the patterns or trends)?
  • Are certain groups or categories of employee more or less likely than others to browse the site? 
  • ... 
... Once you start, it's not hard to come up with a list of objectives, a set of questions and (implicitly at least) a suite of possible metrics. If you find yourself short of inspiration, this is an ideal task for a metrics workshop where participants feed and feed off each other.

Analyzing the possible metrics to identify those you intend to use can also be done in the workshop setting, pragmatically on scratchpads, or more formally using spreadsheets and documents that get circulated for comment. 

Of course, if all of that is too hard, you can probably get what you need, for now, from the page counts ... so track them, and don't forget to check and ponder the stats every so often. It's as a good place to start as any.
Happy new year!
Gary

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