Section: INFORMATION SECURITY PROGRAM MANAGEMENT

The percentage of compliant servers will be a relevant indicator of the risk exposure of the infrastructure. However, the percentage is less relevant than the overall trend, which would provide a measurement of the efficiency of the IT security program. The number of patches applied would be less relevant, as this would depend on the number of vulnerabilities identified and patches provided by vendors.

Explanation/Reference:
Explanation:
Continuous monitoring control initiatives are expensive, so they have to be used in areas where the risk is at its greatest level. These areas are the ones with high impact and high frequency of occurrence.
Regulations and legislations that require tight IT security measures focus on requiring organizations to establish an IT security governance structure that manages IT security with a risk-based approach, so each organization decides which kinds of controls are implemented. Continuous monitoring is not necessarily a requirement. Measures such as contingency planning are commonly used when incidents rarely happen but have a high impact each time they happen. Continuous monitoring is unlikely to be necessary. Continuous control monitoring initiatives are not needed in all electronic commerce environments. There are some electronic commerce environments where the impact of incidents is not high enough to support the implementation of this kind of initiative.