Study: Breaking Silos Could Reduce Breach Costs

The cybersecurity industry experienced some ups and downs last year, according to the 3,200 senior security professionals from 18 countries who participated in Cisco’s fifth annual CISO Benchmark Study. The study revealed that security professionals experienced both encouraging gains, with only 30% of respondents saying they suffered from cyber fatigue this year, down from 46% last year. In addition, 39% of participants said that improvements to their security and awareness training programs helped to better protect the company from security breaches. Another 39% said that implementing risk mitigation techniques resulted in security improvements and breach cost reduction. The majority (95%) of participants felt that they were very or extremely collaborative between networking and security teams, an indication that not working in silos has an obvious financial upside, as "59% of those who were very/extremely collaborative between networking and security experienced a financial impact of their most impactful breach of under $100K – the lowest category of breach cost."