Only 1 percent of organizations in the Philippines have the “mature” level of readiness needed to be resilient against modern cybersecurity risks, according to 2024 Cybersecurity Readiness Index of NASDAQ-listed firm Cisco. Cisco developed the index to assess the readiness of companies on five key pillars: identity intelligence, network resilience, machine trustworthiness, cloud reinforcement, and artificial intelligence fortification. It is comprised of 31 corresponding solutions and capabilities.
The index 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.
Companies 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 by distributed working environments where data can be spread across limitless services, devices, applications, and users. However, 78 percent of 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.”
Overall, the study found that only 1 percent of companies in the Philippines are ready to tackle today’s threats, with 64 percent organizations falling into the Beginner or Formative stages of readiness. Globally, 3 percent of companies are at a Mature stage.
The Cisco survey showed 67 percent of respondent expect a cybersecurity indecent to disrupt their business within the next 24 months, with the cost expected to be substantial.
Around 59 percent of respondents said they experienced a cybersecurity incident in the past 12 months, with 36 percent saying it cost them at least USD300,000.
Having multiple cybersecurity point solutions, the survey found, don’t guarantee effective results, with 76 percent of respondents claiming having this traditional approach only slowed down their teams’ ability to detect, respond and recover from incidents.
The study also found out that insecure and unmanaged devices add complexity; the cyber talent gap persists and it has hampered solutions to cybersecurity issues; and that companies are ramping up investment for cybersecurity upgrade within the next 24 months.
To overcome the challenges in the threat landscape, companies must accelerate meaningful investments in security, including adoption of innovative security measures and a security platform approach, strengthen their network resilience, establish meaningful use of generative AI, and ramp up recruitment to bridge the cybersecurity skills gap.
“The threat landscape today is more complicated than ever and organizations globally including those in the Philippines continue to lag in their cyber resilience. Companies need to adopt a platform approach that will provide a simple, secure, single pane of glass view into their entire architecture to strengthen their security posture and best take advantage of the opportunities that come with emerging technologies,” said Zaza Soriano-Nicart, managing director, Cisco Philippines.
