A mere 15% of organizations globally have the ‘Mature’ level of readiness needed to be resilient against today’s modern cybersecurity risks, according to Cisco’s first-ever Cybersecurity Readiness Index.

The report measures the readiness of companies to maintain cybersecurity resilience against modern threats. These measures cover five core pillars that form the baseline of required defences: identity, devices, network, application workloads, and data, and encompasses 19 different solutions within the pillars.

Conducted by an independent third party, the double-blind survey asked 6,700 private sector cybersecurity leaders across 27 markets to indicate which of these solutions they had deployed and the stage of deployment. Companies were then classified into four stages of increasing readiness: Beginner, Formative, Progressive, and Mature.

Alongside the stark finding that only 15% of companies are at the Mature stage, more than half (55%) of companies globally fall into the Beginner (8%) or Formative (47%) stages – meaning they are performing below average on cybersecurity readiness.

This readiness gap is telling, not least because 82% of respondents said they expect a cybersecurity incident to disrupt their business in the next 12 to 24 months.

The cost of being unprepared can be substantial, as 60% of respondents said they had a cybersecurity incident in the last 12 months and 41% of those affected said it cost them at least $US500,000.

“The move to a hybrid world has fundamentally changed the landscape for companies and created even greater cybersecurity complexity. Organizations must stop approaching defence with a mix of point tools and instead, consider integrated platforms to achieve security resilience while reducing complexity,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco.

“Only then will businesses be able to close the cybersecurity readiness gap.”