Cisco ANZ CTO urges organisations to eliminate internal friction to improve attack readiness

A mere 5% of Australian organisations are fully prepared to defend against AI-driven attacks, according to new research from Cisco. 
 
The vendor surveyed 300 security professionals in Australia – out of a group of 8,000 primarily senior security and IT leaders in 30 markets worldwide – and found that the majority are either moderately or limitedly prepared, with 13% admitting that they don’t feel they’re ready to defend at all.
 
Those ‘relentless defenders’, as Cisco describes them - the 5% of Australian organisations and 8% of organisations worldwide who believe that they're fully prepared – were distinguished not necessarily by what they own and the technology stack that they use, but more by how they eliminated internal friction. 
 
This meant prioritising a single consolidated view of their data, governing their operational security practices before looking to scale, and upskilling their people.

Among the blockers identified to uplift their security posture, six out of 10 organisations in Australia cited organisational issues - team silos, slow approvals, broken ownership, disconnect with the boardroom and ‘data blindness’ - as one of the biggest impediments.
 
Cisco ANZ's CTO Carl Solder shared that there were “many instances” in the research where companies called out the fact that they had too many products to manage when it came to security, with each of these products maintaining their own data repositories. 
 
“This is why you're starting to see [a shift] towards this notion of a platform,” he said. 
 
“Rather than having best-of-breed products, there's recognition across the industry that maybe working with fewer products and having tighter consolidation and correlation across those products working as a platform is going to give organisations an edge and enable them to be a little bit more reactive should there be a compromise,” he said. 
 
Solder stated that Cisco itself has adjusted its strategy to build out a platforms approach, unifying its hardware around a common silicon platform called Silicon One. 
 
"When you look at security, collaboration, cloud, networking, we're starting to converge and consolidate that and then we're unifying that with a unified management administration layer," he explained to techpartner.news. 
 
"For one vendor to build something that addresses every single thing in market, that's going to be hard, but certainly we're trying to build platforms that address the majority of the needs that most customers are looking for. If you look across our security portfolio, that's everything from user to device to network to application to data." 
 
Even though many vendors across the market are integrating more AI functionality into the back end of products, fewer than half (39%) of the Australian organisations surveyed felt that they had extensively taken advantage of those capabilities via deployment, the study found. 
 
The top fears of implementing those capabilities, Cisco’s research found, is data exposure, AI systems getting compromised themselves and third-party data handling risks. 
 
Among Australian organisations who were actively deploying AI security capabilities, however, 90% reported threat-detection speed improved by 25% or more; 88% reported response and remediation speed improved by 25%; and more than a third (35%) said AI is already significantly reducing operational burden. 
 
As to what needs to change to uplift those 13% of organisations who admitted they’re exposed, Solder said that it starts with identifying owners for all parts of the security remediation and resolution process before fixing toolsets - essentially, building one picture and one team. 
 
“Start leveraging the power of AI, and let it take over that first 10 minutes - doing the scanning, doing the identification, doing the suggestions and the remediation – [as] that first 10 minutes is really important in taking that burden off the human operators," he said. 
 
“Designing for the easiest path, not just the compliant one,” is important as well, as is “looking at how you can marry up the technology with the best organisational structure."
 
"That in combination is what we believe is going to place organisations in the best place to secure against all of the new threats in this emerging AI security threat landscape," he stated.