Towards Security Assurance Metrics for Service Systems Security

A major shift of paradigm is currently taking place in the business world. The old business model, once focused on the efficiency of manufacturing and galvanised by standardisation, is steadily making place to a service-based business model underpinned by customisation.

Although such a shift is being embraced throughout the developed as well as the emerging world, academia is still lagging behind as the potential of service as a discipline has yet to be fully explored. In a service business, ensuring customer confidence on the security of the service is key to a successful service launch or for retaining customers’ loyalty. However as research on service science is still at its infancy, metrics for the specification and valuation of such confidence are still to emerge.

To encourage more work in this direction, this paper explores the motivation behind the ongoing adoption of a service paradigm and provides a set of metrics that could be beneficially investigated by academia to help businesses address more effectively the need for both service provider and consumer to have Security Assurance.