Cybersecurity resilience is a top priority for companies as they look to defend against a rapidly evolving threat landscape, according to the latest edition of Cisco’s annual Security Outcomes Report.
Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience identifies the top seven success factors that boost enterprise security resilience, with a particular focus on cultural, environmental, and solution-based factors that businesses leverage to achieve security. The findings are based on survey responses from over 4,700 participants across 26 countries.
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Resilience has emerged as a top priority as a staggering 62% of organisations surveyed said they had experienced a security event that impacted business in the past two years. The leading types of incidents were network or data breaches (51.5%), network or system outages (51.1%), ransomware events (46.7%) and distributed denial of service attacks (46.4%).
These incidents resulted in severe repercussions for the companies that experienced them, along with the ecosystem of organisations they do business with. The leading impacts cited include IT and communications interruption (62.6%), supply chain disruption (43%), impaired internal operations (41.4%) and lasting brand damage (39.7%).
With stakes this high, it is no surprise that 96% of executives surveyed for the report said that security resilience is high priority for them. The findings further highlight that the main objectives of security resilience for security leaders and their teams are to prevent incidents, and mitigate losses when they occur.
“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,” Cisco Security Business Group CISO Helen Patton said.
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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.
“Security, after all, is a risk business. As companies don’t secure everything, everywhere, security resilience allows them to focus their security resources on the pieces of the business that add the most value to an organisation, and ensure that value is protected,” she added.
