62 percent of companies say cybersecurity incidents have impacted their operations

Cybersecurity resilience is a top priority for companies as they look to defend against a rapidly evolving threat landscape, according to the latest annual Security Outcomes Report from Cisco.

The report reveals that 62 percent of organizations surveyed say they have experienced a security event that impacted business in the past two years. The leading types of incidents are network or data breaches (51.5 percent), network or system outages (51.1 percent), ransomware events (46.7 percent) and distributed denial of service attacks (46.4 percent).

The leading impacts cited as a result of these events include IT and communications interruption (62.6 percent), supply chain disruption (43 percent), impaired internal operations (41.4 percent) and lasting brand damage (39.7 percent). It's unsurprising then that security resilience is a high priority for 96 percent of executives surveyed.

"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. 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," says Helen Patton, CISO of Cisco Security Business Group. "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 organization, and ensure that value is protected."

The report has developed a methodology to generate a security resilience score for the organizations surveyed. This reveals that organizations that report poor security support from the C-suite score 39 percent lower than those with strong executive support. Those businesses that report an excellent security culture score 46 percent higher on average than those without.

Security technologies influence these scores, companies that report implementing a mature zero trust model see a 30 percent increase in resilience score compared to those that have none. Advanced extended detection and response capabilities correlate to a 45 percent increase for organizations over those that report having no detection and response solutions, while converging networking and security into a mature, cloud-delivered secure access services edge boosts security resilience scores by 27 percent.

You can read more and get the full report on the Cisco blog.

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