Majority of companies have experienced a cybersecurity incident in the past year

Cyber security resilience is a high priority among executives surveyed for recent research being conducted by Cisco Systems Inc. The technology company found that 62 per cent of the 4,700 participants surveyed across 26 countries say their organizations had experienced a recent security incident impacting business operations. The research also found that security resilience is a high priority for 96 per cent of those executives surveyed.

The most recent edition of Cisco’s annual Security Outcomes Report found that network or data breaches were reported by 51.5 per cent of the group which had experienced a recent incident, network or system outages were reported by 51.1 per cent of that group, ransomware events were reported by 46.7 per cent and distributed denial of service attacks happened at 46.4 per cent of companies reporting incidents.

The resulting impacts included IT and communication interruption 62.6 per cent of the time, supply chain disruption 43 per cent of the time, impaired internal operations 41.4 per cent of the time and lasting brand damage 39.7 per cent of the time.

The report also includes a methodology the firm uses to generate security resilience scores. Success factors affecting those scores include C-suite support for security initiatives, security culture and efforts to maintain extra internal staffing and resources to respond to incidents. Companies with either mostly on-premise or mostly cloud-based infrastructures had the highest and nearly identical security resilience scores, while those in the initial stages of transitioning between the two saw score drop between 8.5 per cent and 14 per cent, depending on how difficult the hybrid environments were to manage.

They add that advanced extended detection and response capabilities correlated to a 45 per cent increase in resilience scores over those organizations that report having no detection or response solutions. Converging networking and security into a mature, cloud delivered secure access service also boosted resilience scores by 27 per cent.