Report by Cisco
Relentless Defense A global report about cybersecurity in the AI era
Key Findings
36% of surveyed security practitioners struggle to translate trasked data into clear business impact.
39% of security teams say critical insights are getting missed because the data lives somewhere they can’t reach.
54% of security practitioners are very confident in their ability to detect and respond to a compromised AI agent or autonomous system.
41% of organizations that increased security spending saw fewer incidents.
45% of organizations saw incidents rise anyway or remained unchanged despite their increased security investments.
91% of security leaders surveyed experienced at least one material disruptive cyber incident in the past year.
35% of security leaders surveyed were involved in an AI-related attack in the past year.
26% of respondents said that AI is already significantly reducing operational burden in their security organizations.
Only 8% of organizations surveyed have the coverage, response speed, and organizational alignment needed to defend at the pace of agentic AI ("Relentless Defenders").
43% of surveyed security practitioners say what they are tracking is too technical to influence executive decision-makers.
27% of surveyed security practitioners don’t have a consistent way to measure performance accurately at all.
40% of security teams say they spend more time manually collecting and correlating data from different systems than they spend dealing with and chasing the threat.