Cisco Study Reveals Very Few Organizations in Canada Prepared to Defend Against Today's Rapidly Evolving Threat Landscape

News Summary:

• Only one per cent of organizations in Canada have the ‘Mature’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against today’s cybersecurity risks.
• Readiness is critical, as 63 per cent of respondents said a cybersecurity incident is likely to disrupt their business in the next 12 to 24 months.
• Companies are taking action to address this as 96 per cent of companies expect to increase their cybersecurity budgets in the next 12 months.
  
  

TORONTO, March 27, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Only one per cent of organizations in Canada have the ‘Mature’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against modern cybersecurity risks, according to Cisco’s (NASDAQ: CSCO) 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index.

The 2024 Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index was developed in an era defined by hyperconnectivity and a rapidly evolving threat landscape. 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.

These challenges are compounded in today’s distributed working environments where data can be spread across limitless services, devices, applications, and users. However, 78 per cent of Canadian 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.

“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 organizations need to prioritize 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.”

2024 Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index: Underprepared and Overconfident Companies Tackle an Evolving Threat Landscape

The Index assesses 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, Formative, Progressive and Mature.