Very Few Organizations Prepared to Defend Against Today's Rapidly Evolving Threat Landscape: CISCO
Only three percent of organizations across the globe have the ‘Mature’
level of readiness needed to be resilient against modern cybersecurity risks,
according to Cisco’s (NASDAQ: CSCO) 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index. Released today, the Index highlights that readiness is down
significantly from one year ago, when 15% of companies were ranked mature.
The 2024 Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index was developed in an era
defined by hyperconnectivity and a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Companies
today continue to be targeted with a variety of techniques that range from
phishing and ransomware to supply chain and social engineering attacks. And
while they are building defenses against these attacks, they still struggle to
defend against them, slowed down by their own overly complex security postures
that are dominated by multiple point solutions.
These challenges are compounded in today’s distributed working
environments where data can be spread across limitless services, devices, applications
and users. However, 80% of companies still feel moderately to very confident in
their ability to defend against a cyberattack with their current infrastructure
- this disparity between confidence and readiness suggests that companies may
have misplaced confidence in their ability to navigate the threat landscape and
may not be properly assessing the true scale of the challenges they face.
2024
Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index: Underprepared and Overconfident Companies
Tackle an Evolving Threat Landscape
The Index assesses the readiness of companies on five key pillars: Identity Intelligence, Network Resilience, Machine
Trustworthiness, Cloud Reinforcement, and AI Fortified, which are comprised of 31
corresponding solutions and capabilities. It is based on a double-blind survey
of more than 8,000 private sector security and business leaders across 30
global markets conducted by an independent third party. The respondents were
asked to indicate which of these solutions and capabilities they had deployed
and the stage of deployment. Companies were then classified into four stages of
increasing readiness: Beginner, Formative,
Progressive and Mature.
“We cannot underestimate the threat posed by our own overconfidence,”
said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and
Collaboration at Cisco. “Today's organizations need to prioritize investments
in integrated platforms and lean into AI in order to operate at machine scale
and finally tip the scales in the favor of defenders.”
Findings
Overall, the study found that only three percent of companies are ready
to tackle today’s threats, with two-thirds of organizations falling into the
Beginner or Formative stages of readiness. Further:
· Future Cyber Incidents Expected: 73% of respondents said they expect a cybersecurity incident to disrupt
their business in the next 12 to 24 months. The cost of being unprepared can be
substantial, as 54% of respondents said they experienced a cybersecurity
incident in the last 12 months, and 52% of those affected said it cost them at
least US$300,000.
· Point Solution Overload: The traditional approach of adopting multiple cybersecurity point
solutions has not delivered effective results, as 80% of respondents admitted
that having multiple point solutions slowed down their team’s ability to
detect, respond and recover from incidents. This raises significant concerns as
67% of organizations said they have deployed ten or more point solutions in
their security stacks, while 25% said they have 30 or more.
· Unsecure and Unmanaged Devices Add
Complexity: 85% of companies said their
employees access company platforms from unmanaged devices, and 43% of those
spend one-fifth (20%) of their time logged onto company networks from unmanaged
devices. Additionally, 29% reported that their employees hop between at least
six networks over a week.
· The Cyber Talent Gap Persists: Progress is being further hampered by critical talent shortages, with
87% of companies highlighting it as an issue. In fact, 46% of companies said
they had more than ten roles related to cybersecurity unfilled in their
organization at the time of the survey.
· Future Cyber Investments Ramping Up: Companies are aware of the challenge and are ramping up their
defenses with over half (52%) planning to significantly upgrade their IT
infrastructure in the next 12 to 24 months. This is a marked increase from just
one-third (33%) who planned to do so last year. Most prominently, organizations
plan to upgrade existing solutions (66%), deploy new solutions (57%), and
invest in AI-driven technologies (55%). Further, 97% of companies plan to
increase their cybersecurity budget in the next 12 months, and 86% respondents
say their budgets will increase by 10% or more.
To overcome the challenges of today’s threat landscape, companies must
accelerate meaningful investments in security, including adoption of innovative
security measures and a security platform approach, strengthen their network
resilience, establish meaningful use of generative AI, and ramp up recruitment
to bridge the cybersecurity skills gap.
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