Cisco report uncovers vital factors for enhancing security resilience in Saudi Arabia

At LEAP, Cisco released the KSA findings of its latest Security Outcomes Report, focusing on “Achieving Security Resilience”.

Cisco has released its third annual security study, which showcases responses from over 4,700 participants from 26 countries, including Saudi Arabia. The report examines the top factors that enhance the security resilience of enterprises and analyzes responses against these factors to determine the strongest and weakest aspects of current enterprise security practices.

Why Security Resilience Is Important in Saudi Arabia 

The findings in Saudi Arabia revealed that 54% of organizations surveyed had experienced a security event that impacted business. The most common incidents were distributed denial of service attacks (60%), network or system outages (54%), and malicious insider abuse events (40%).

These instances had serious consequences for the firms involved as well as the ecosystem of businesses they interact with. With events thus significant, it should come as no surprise that the primary goals of security resilience are to prevent incidents and reduce losses when they do occur (64% of firms worldwide confirmed that cybersecurity incidents harm their resilience).

Salman Faqeeh, Managing Director, Cisco Saudi Arabia said “In the last few years, the Kingdom has taken confident steps towards digitization, bringing new opportunities to the country. This progress must be accompanied hand-in-hand by a sharp focus on cybersecurity.”  

He added “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.”

Seven Success Factors of Security Resilience

The report creates a global approach for calculating a security resilience score for the surveyed organizations, by identifying seven success factors that have the greatest impact on an organization’s security resilience. These include securing executive support, fostering a culture of security, streamlining hybrid cloud setups, maximizing the adoption of zero trust, expanding detection and response capabilities, and implementing edge security. If these factors are successfully implemented, the report predicts that an organization’s overall security resilience score can improve from the lowest 10th percentile to the highest 10th percentile.

Globally, security is a human endeavour, as leadership, company culture, and resourcing have a significant impact on resilience:

• Organizations that report poor security support from the C-suite scored 39% lower than those with strong executive support.
• Businesses that cultivate an excellent security culture scored 46 % higher on average than those without.
• Companies that maintain extra internal staffing and resources to respond to incidents resulted in a 15% boost in resilient outcomes.

Businesses need to take care to reduce complexity when transitioning from on-premise to fully cloud-based environments:

• Firms with predominantly on-premise or cloud-based technology infrastructures had the highest security resilience scores, which were almost identical. However, organizations that are just starting to shift from on-premise to a hybrid cloud setup experienced a decrease in scores ranging from 8.5% to 14%, depending on the level of difficulty in managing the hybrid environment.

Adopting and maturing advanced security solutions saw significant impacts on resilient outcomes:

• Companies that reported implementing a mature zero trust model saw a 30% increase in resilience score compared to those that had none.
• Advanced extended detection and response capabilities correlated to an incredible 45% increase over organizations that report having no detection and response solutions.
• Converging networking and security into a mature, cloud-delivered secure access services edge (SASE) boosted security resilience scores by 27%.