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

HÀ NỘI — Only six per cent of organisations in Việt Nam have the ‘Mature’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against modern cybersecurity risks, according to Cisco’s 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 defences 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, 71 per cent 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.

The index assesses the readiness of companies on five key pillars including 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.

“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 organisations need to prioritise investments in integrated platforms and lean into AI in order to operate at machine scale and finally tip the scales in the favour of defenders.”

“The threat landscape today is more complicated than ever and organisations globally, including those in Việt Nam, 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 Tay Bee Kheng, President, Cisco ASEAN.

To overcome the challenges of today’s 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. — VNS