No. A single mean-time-to-resolve figure compresses incidents with different severity, business impact and decision paths. Measure readiness, time to declaration, time to critical containment or recovery decisions, business-impact duration, evidence preservation, recovery validation and corrective-action closure, segmented by incident type and materiality.
External reference
Final, April 2025. NIST integrates incident response across CSF 2.0 risk-management activities and focuses on improving detection, response and recovery effectiveness. Cybatar authors the specific measurement pattern below.
Primary source →Measures to retain
Readiness
Track exercised playbooks, current contacts, evidence procedures, critical dependencies and unresolved readiness findings.
Detection to declaration
Measure how long material events remain unowned or below incident threshold before formal incident coordination begins.
Time to critical decision
Track the latency to approved containment, credential, isolation, recovery or notification decisions—not only technical task completion.
Business-impact duration
Measure disruption or material exposure in terms understood by business owners, not only SOC timestamps.
Evidence readiness and preservation
Measure whether required artefacts were available, preserved with context and usable for investigation.
Recovery validation and corrective action
Track restored service validation, recurrence conditions, lessons and overdue corrective actions after closure.
Operating method
Segment incidents
Compare like incident classes and severity levels rather than aggregate every event into one average.
Measure decisions as well as tasks
Identify delays caused by authority, dependency or business decisions, not just analyst activity.
Connect time to impact
A shorter response time matters only in context of containment quality, business impact and recovery confidence.
Close the learning loop
Track corrective actions, playbook changes and recurring causes after incident closure.
Measurement anti-patterns
Relevant Cybatar sources
Claim boundary
Faster times do not automatically mean safer outcomes. Incident metrics can be distorted by severity mix, detection changes, reporting behaviour, approval latency and closure policy; they should not be used as standalone proof of response effectiveness.
Cybatar publishes measurement and reporting guidance as a first-party operating model. Examples are not universal benchmarks, regulatory thresholds, promises of security outcomes or evidence that a particular deployment is effective.