Cisco released the KSA results of its latest Security Outcomes Report, titled “Achieving Security Resilience,” at LEAP.
The third edition of the annual security study gathered responses from over 4,700 participants in 26 countries, including Saudi Arabia. It focuses on identifying the key success factors for improving enterprise security resilience and evaluates responses to these factors to uncover the strengths and weaknesses in current enterprise security practices.
The importance of security resilience in Saudi Arabia
The survey results in Saudi Arabia showed that 54 percent of the surveyed
organisations suffered from a security incident that affected their business
operations. The most frequent types of incidents were distributed denial of
service attacks (60 percent), network or system outages (54 percent), and
malicious insider abuse events (40 percent).
Such incidents caused significant harm to the affected companies and their
business partners. Given that 64 percent of organisations globally acknowledged
that cyber security incidents impact their resilience, it is clear why the
primary goals of security resilience are to prevent incidents and minimise
losses in the event of an incident.
“In the last few years, the Kingdom has taken confident steps towards digitisation, bringing new opportunities to the country. This progress must be accompanied hand-in-hand by a sharp focus on cybersecurity,” said Salman Faqeeh, Managing Director, Cisco Saudi Arabia.
“Cisco is uniquely positioned to support the government and businesses of all sizes and across industries in the kingdom, addressing the cyber security challenges they are facing, and helping them increase their security resilience. Our presence at LEAP this year provides us with the perfect platform to engage with our partners and customers, while demonstrating our latest range of security innovations and solutions for safer, more secure and more efficient operations.”
Success factors for security resilience
The Security Outcomes Report by Cisco uses a global methodology to calculate security resilience scores for organisations. Seven success factors were identified as having the biggest impact on security resilience: executive support, security culture, simple hybrid cloud, mature zero trust, extended detection and response, security at the edge.
In addition, the study noted that globally, security is a human endeavour, as leadership, company culture, and resourcing have a significant impact on resilience. It noted that good leadership, company culture, and resources also play a big role in security resilience, with organisations with strong executive support scoring 39 percent higher, those with a strong security culture 46 percent higher, and those with extra resources for incident response 15 percent higher.
The report also pointed out that complex hybrid cloud environments can lower resilience scores by 8.5-14 percent, while mature zero trust, advanced detection and response, and converged networking and security (SASE) boost scores by 30 percent, 45 percent, and 27 percent respectively.
