Cisco: Very Few Organizations Prepared for Today’s Threat Landscape

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 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, which also says that readiness is down significantly from one year ago, when 15% of companies were ranked mature.

The report also says that 73% of respondents said they expect a cybersecurity incident to disrupt their business in the next 12 to 24 months, 54% 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.

Companies are therefore 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.

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.​

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.

“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.”

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.

Channel Impact^®

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.