The latest edition of Cisco’s annual Security Outcomes Report reveals that cybersecurity resilience has become a top priority for companies as they look to defend against a rapidly evolving threat landscape. 

“The Security Outcomes Reports are a study into what works and what doesn’t in cyber security. The ultimate goal is to cut through the noise in the market by identifying practices that lead to more secure outcomes for defenders,” Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration Jeetu Patel said. 

“This year we focused on identifying the key factors that elevate the security resilience of a business to among the very best in the industry.”   

The study, which identifies the top seven success factors that boost enterprise security resilience, found that 62 per cent of organisations had experienced a security event that impacted business in the past two years. 

It was found that the leading types of cyber incidents that organisations faced were network or data breaches, network or system outages, ransomware events and distributed denial of service attacks.  

These incidents led to severe repercussions for the affected companies and the ecosystem of organizations they do business with, often leading to IT and communications interruption, supply chain disruption, impaired internal operations and lasting brand damage. 

Because of these repercussions, the study showed that 96 per cent of executives surveyed said that security resilience is a high priority in order to prevent incidents and mitigate losses when they occur. 

Cisco’s latest report also reveals that security is a human endeavour as leadership, company culture and resourcing have an oversized impact on security resilience. 

It was also found that businesses need to take care to reduce complexity when transitioning from on-premise to fully cloud-based environments.  

Organisations whose technology infrastructures were mostly on-premise or cloud-based had the highest security resilience scores, while those who are still transitioning saw a drop in their resilience scores depending on how difficult the hybrid environments were to manage. 

The study also showed that adopting and maturing advanced security solutions has significant impacts on an organisation’s cybersecurity resilience. 

CISO of Cisco Security Business Group Helen Patton states that security resilience allows organisations to focus their security resources on the parts of the business that add the most value. 

“Technology is transforming businesses at a scale and speed never seen before. While this is creating new opportunities, it also brings with it challenges, especially on the security front,” she said. 

“To be able to tackle these effectively, companies need the ability to anticipate, identify, and withstand cyber threats, and if breached be able to rapidly recover from one. That is what building resilience is all about.” 

With AAP 

Eliza Sayon

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Eliza is a content producer and editor at Public Spectrum. She is an experienced writer on topics related to the government and to the public, as well as stories that uplift and improve the community.

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