Jamie Bennet
Cisco’s inaugural Cybersecurity Readiness Index showed that only 15 percent of companies worldwide are at the “mature” stage of preparedness against online threats.
Out of the 6,700 cybersecurity executives surveyed from the private sector, 82 percent said they expect their business to be disrupted by cyber attacks in the next 12 to 24 months, Cisco reported Tuesday.
The company’s first-ever IT security index set four stages of readiness: beginner, formative, progressive and mature. It is based on five pillars: application workloads, data, devices, identity and network.
Researchers found that more than half of the respondents are only at the beginner or formative level, which have readiness rates of 8 percent and 47 percent, respectively.
Sixty percent of the surveyed companies admitted that they had an incident of malicious activity in the past year, costing a minimum of $500,000 to nearly half of those affected.
“Organizations must stop approaching defense with a mix of point tools and instead, consider integrated platforms to achieve security resilience while reducing complexity,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco.
“Only then will businesses be able to close the cybersecurity readiness gap.”
On March 30, cybersecurity will be the focal point of discussions at the Potomac Officers Club’s virtual conference. Click here to learn more about the “Enhancing Cybersecurity for Critical Civilian Infrastructure” forum.
