Six out of 10 surveyed security practitioners say lack of coordination, approvals and access to data leave them struggling to improve organisational defences, according to insights from Cisco’s Relentless Defense Report.
“Organisations are siloed,” remarked Cisco South Africa GM Smangele Nkosi during a media roundtable yesterday. “When there is an attack, it takes teams more effort and time to identify an incident, remediate and recover.
“The process, from a value-chain perspective, is complex. More departments are part of decision-making around what needs to happen from a cyber security perspective.
“Forty percent of the respondents felt they need technology to enhance their resilience posture, but 60% said organisations need better coordination, faster decision-making and easier access to information.”
Formerly named the Cyber Security Readiness Index, Cisco’s new report is based on a double-blind survey of 8 000 organisational leaders across 30 markets, including 170 from South Africa, who have cyber security responsibilities in their companies.
It scored organisations on how completely they can protect their environment; how quickly they can detect, respond and remediate a threat; and what slows them down.
It also examined how security practitioners are adapting to a threat landscape that is being reshaped by artificial intelligence (AI). The report’s other indicators show an uptick in supply chain attacks, how AI is raising the stakes, and how the cyber security discussion has been elevated into boardrooms.
It’s clear from the report findings that threat actors are using enhanced AI tools to drive their cyber attacks, calling on businesses to raise their posture and cyber resilience, said Nkosi.
Referencing research data from Cisco-owned firm Splunk, she stated that one out of three downtime incidents are cyber security-related. Over 2 000 of the world’s largest companies lost $600 billion a year in downtime costs, up 50% in two years.
“In my talks with CIOs, we see that they are no longer head of systems but must ensure they have resilient systems that protect the critical assets of their customers and their environments as well. Added to this is knowing what to do from an AI perspective, because AI and cyber security now go hand-in-hand.
“The increase in AI deployment makes cyber security critical, from an attack and resilience perspective.”
Drilling into the numbers
The report’s findings show 95% of organisations reported a cyber security incident in the past 12 months, with 40% of those incidents driven by AI-enhanced mechanisms.
An in-depth look at organisational friction shows that only 41% of organisations globally and in South Africa say security, networking and IT teams operate as one team with shared visibility and tooling.
Globally, 43% say what they measure is too technical to persuade executives, 36% struggle to translate business metrics into information that can influence decision-making, and 27% have no consistent way to measure security performance at all.
In terms of data access, 40% globally and in South Africa spend more time collecting and correlating data across systems than addressing the actual threat, and 39% (35% in South Africa) say critical insights are missed because data sits out of reach.
“South African security teams have invested well in cyber security coverage and AI, and this shows in their scores. But spotting a compromised AI agent only helps if security, network and IT teams can respond together,” noted Nkosi.
“In South Africa, 34% of organisations still coordinate their response manually, which won’t keep pace with AI agents that respond within seconds. Ownership and approvals are leadership decisions, and how quickly businesses settle them will determine how safely they can scale AI.”
In terms of the report’s best performers, which are classified as relentless defenders, they scored 80 or more out of 100. They make up 8% of organisations globally and 9% of South African organisations. The global average score is 64 out of 100. In South Africa it is 68.
According to Cisco, the best performers are more likely to report stronger AI outcomes in security operations not because they spend more, but because they lead across the organisational dimensions that enable security teams to act quickly.
In addition, 83% operate as a single coordinated security team with shared visibility and tools across security, network and infrastructure, versus 37% of all other defenders.
A further 86% apply consistent controls to AI agents and non-human identities, versus 37%.
Another 25% report that AI helped improve threat-detection speed by more than 100%, versus 7%.
Among organisations that increased security spending, the top performing (8%) globally were nearly twice as likely to see incidents fall (71% versus 39%).
Share
