perincident

Perincident is a term used to describe a metric that attributes costs, impacts, or resources to individual incidents rather than to ongoing systems or processes. It is often discussed in the contexts of risk management, incident response, and service delivery as a way to measure the financial or operational effect of discrete events.

In practice, perincident metrics compute an average by dividing total costs or impacts in a period by the number of incidents in that period. This approach can apply to financial accounting, insurance risk assessment, cybersecurity incident response, and uptime or reliability analyses. For example, a company might calculate the average remediation cost per security incident or the downtime cost per service outage.

Common contexts for perincident use include cybersecurity budgets, incident-based cost accounting, and reliability engineering. The term is not universally standardized; it is more often encountered as two words (per incident) or as a general concept rather than as a formal, widely adopted metric. When used as a compound, perincident may appear in specific industry documents or vendor reporting.

Advantages of the perincident concept include a clearer link between discrete events and their costs, facilitating incident-focused budgeting and prioritization. Limitations include the risk of oversimplification, as complex failures may involve multiple contributing incidents or systemic factors. Accurate application depends on consistent incident counting and careful definition of what constitutes a reportable incident.

Related concepts include cost per incident, incident-based accounting, and risk-adjusted budgeting. Perincident metrics are often paired with broader capacity planning and total cost of ownership analyses to provide a fuller view of operational risk.