Cybersecurity resilience emerges as top priority for Vietnamese organizations

Titled, Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience, the study identifies the top seven success factors that boost enterprise security resilience, with a particular focus on cultural, environmental, and solution-based factors that businesses leverage to achieve security. The findings are based on survey responses from over 4,700 participants across 26 countries.

Resilience has emerged as a top priority as a staggering 63 percent of organizations surveyed said they had experienced a security event that impacted business in the past two years. The leading types of incidents were distributed denial of service attacks (71 percent), network or data breach (64 percent), network or system outage (55 percent), and ransomware event (52 percent).

These incidents resulted in severe repercussions for the companies that experienced them, along with the ecosystem of organizations they do business with. The leading impacts cited include IT/communications interruption, supply chain disruption, loss of competitive advantage, and response and recovery costs.

With stakes this high, it is no surprise that 97 percent of executives surveyed for the report said that security resilience is a high priority for them. The findings further highlight that the main objectives of security resilience for security leaders and their teams are to mitigate financial losses from security incidents, ensure business continuity through disruptive events, and prevent major security incidents and losses.

“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,” said Helen Patton, CISO, Cisco Business Security 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,” she added.

Seven success factors of security resilience

This year’s report has developed a methodology to generate a security resilience score for the organizations surveyed and identify seven data-backed success factors. Globally, organizations that had these factors present were among the top 90th percentile of resilient businesses. Conversely, those lacking these were placed in the bottom 10th percentile of performers.

The findings of the study underline the fact that security is a human endeavor as leadership, company culture and resourcing have a significant impact on resilience:

In addition, businesses need to take care to reduce complexity when transitioning from on-premise to fully cloud-based environments.

Finally, adopting and maturing advanced security solutions has significant impacts on resilient outcomes.

“The Security Outcomes Reports are a study into what works and what doesn’t in cybersecurity. The ultimate goal is to cut through the noise in the market by identifying practices that lead to more secure outcomes for defenders,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “This year we focus on identifying the key factors that elevate the security resilience of a business to among the very best in the industry.”