I am excited to announce the release of Cisco’s annual flagship cybersecurity report, the Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience. It’s about preparing, adapting, and overcoming security challenges and threats, and an organisation’s ability to respond and emerge stronger.It’s the organization’s ability to respond to the inevitable attacks and unexpected events that come our way. In a recent webinar on Security Trends for 2023, the team spoke about laying a good foundation, and when you do, good outcomes will come from that. The Security Outcomes Report, Vol.3 looks at the most important factors that will help you build that foundation and give you the most successful security outcomes.

An EMEA perspective

When it came to the top priority security outcome for organisations, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) were in line with global findings. Preventing major security incidents and losses, mitigating financial losses from security incidents, and adapting to unexpected external change events or trends, were the top three. Interestingly, security leaders prioritised mitigating financial losses whereas more technical and operational security respondents placed the highest importance on preventing major incidents. It’s of course understandable to have differing focuses at different levels but this highlights the importance of agreeing and communicating shared objectives and goals.

When asked to their rate overall resilience, respondents from France had the highest score in EMEA, closely followed by Italy and the Netherlands. Germany had the lowest score (significantly lower than the rest of region and the globe). Slightly contrary to this, when asked how confident they would be to remain resilient in a ‘worst case’ cybersecurity event, France came out second to last with only 27% saying they are strongly confident. The most confident country is the Netherlands with 54%.

Globally across all sizes of business the security outcome that organizations most struggle with is recruiting and retaining talented security personnel; the UK and Germany also noted this as top, reinforcing the ongoing battle against the security skills gap.

Seven success factors

The report analyses the seven success factors that have shown to improve overall security resilience:

1. Establishing executive support can increase security resilience by 39%.
2. Cultivating a culture of security boosts security resilience by 46%.
3. Holding resources in reserve (don’t max out or overwork your staff) can increase it by up to 15%.
4. Simplifying hybrid cloud environments makes an 18% difference over complex ones. ​
5. Maximizing zero trust adoption can lead to 30% gains.​
6. Extending detection and response capabilities show 45% better resilience scores.
7. Taking security to the edge improves resilience by 27%.

I’d encourage you to read the full report, there are some great takeaways on how organizations can improve their resilience with a focus on these areas.

About the Security Outcomes Report

The report is based on an anonymous survey 4,751 active cybersecurity experts from 26 countries. Analysis was done by the Cyentia Institute on behalf of Cisco. EMEA countries represented are France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Spain, The Netherlands and the UK.

The report is available in English, German and French.

To learn more about the findings from this report and the Duo Trusted Access Report, join our webinar: Trust No One – Secure Everyone: EMEA insights into a Zero Trust approach

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