82 per cent of respondents said they expect a cybersecurity incident to disrupt their business in the next 12 to 24 months.
Only 4 per cent of organisations in India have the 'mature'’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against modern cybersecurity risks, according to Cisco’s 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index. It says that 59 per cent of organizations fall into the beginner or formative stages of readiness. Globally, only 3 per cent of companies are at a mature stage.
The report also mentioned that 82 per cent 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 74 per cent of respondents said they experienced a cybersecurity incident in the last 12 months, and 55 cent of those affected said it cost them at least US$300,000.
One of the biggest challenges has been the critical talent shortages, with 91 per cent of companies highlighting it as an issue. In fact, 59 per cent of companies said they had more than ten roles related to cybersecurity unfilled in their organization at the time of the survey.
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, according to the report.
These challenges are compounded in today’s distributed working environments, where data can be spread across limitless services, devices, applications, and users.
However, 88 per cent 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
The 2024 Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index assessed the readiness of companies on five key pillars: identity intelligence, network resilience, machine trustworthiness, cloud reinforcement, and AI fortification, 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, formal, 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 organisations need to prioritise 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,” he added.