As highlighted by Cisco’s 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, companies need to bolster their security defenses with high-grade network partitions, cyber protection layers, firewalls, and irregularity detection mechanisms to combat cyber attackers.
In the backdrop of the last year, there has been a noticeable shortfall in the security readiness amongst business enterprises. On the contrary, there seems to be an incline in their confidence levels. This undoubtedly paints a grim outlook.
Such a stark discrepancy signifies that companies might be overvaluing their capacities to effectively counter and mitigate cyber threats. It also underscores a potential misjudgment of the enormity of the challenges they confront. These observations constitute the core findings of Cisco’s recently published Cybersecurity Readiness Index.
As per the findings of the second annual report – spawned from a survey involving 8,000 leaders in business and cybersecurity across 30 international markets – a minuscule 3% of worldwide organizations demonstrate a “mature” readiness level necessary to withstand contemporary cybersecurity threats. This readiness percentage represents a significant fall from the 15% level recorded just a year ago, states Wendy Nather, the Director of Strategic Engagements at Cisco.
The Cybersecurity Readiness Index calculates security measures into categories such as beginner, formative, progressive and mature. It also maps stages of security implementations, taking into account factors like identity intelligence, trust in machines, resilience of networks, strengthening of cloud, and AI fortification. As much as 71% of the businesses surveyed are placed either in the beginner or formative categories.
It may be uncertain whether this conveys an organizational misunderstanding of present threat levels, or a belief that potential attacks won’t be severely damaging. On the contrary, 75% of companies in the survey feel that a cybersecurity issue could disrupt their operations within the upcoming 12 to 24 months. Additionally, over the last one to two years, 91% of businesses have increased their budget for cybersecurity,” said Nather. This is a significant rise from 2023, when merely a third of the participating respondents planned to enhance their budgets.
Organizations are further challenged by the fact that most data moving across networks is now encrypted. This makes it harder for businesses to detect harmful data packets that might have been infiltrated to compromise the network, claims Cisco.
Nather states, “Currently, the network environment vastly differs from times when businesses had merely a couple of things to handle – their on-site network managed by their own personnel and their connection to the internet. But now, from services to applications, there is less and less control over the network by any given enterprise, which brings about considerable impact on network resilience and other issues.”
