Cisco CISO Survey: Security Vendor Consolidation Increasing

… $5 million per incident for their most significant breach of the past year.

The most collaborative teams lose the least money. Elimination of silos shows a tangible financial upside as 95 percent said their networking and security teams were very or extremely collaborative. Fifty-nine percent of those who stated that their networking and security teams were very/extremely collaborative also stated that the financial impact from their most serious breach was under $100,000 — the lowest category of breach cost in the survey.

Cyber fatigue, defined as virtually giving up on staying ahead of malicious threats and bad actors, is down from 46 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2019.

But the fight is far from over. The following findings show CISO challenges and opportunities for improvement. AI and machine learning (ML), used right, are essential to the initial stages of alert prioritization and management; however, reliance on these technologies has decreased as respondents possibly perceive the tools to be still in their infancy or not ready for prime time.

Employees/users continue to be one of the greatest protection challenges for many CISOs and having an organizational process that starts with security awareness training on day one is essential. Only 51 percent rate themselves as doing an excellent job of managing employee security via comprehensive on-boarding and processes for transfers and departures. Email security remains the No. 1 threat vector.