The Cisco study titled “Security Outcomes Study Volume 2” highlights the need for organizations to regularly update the technologies and solutions to further bolster their cybersecurity infrastructure.
The study noted that in the Philippines, 35% of cybersecurity technologies used by companies are considered outdated by security and privacy professionals working at these organizations. Respondents from the Philippines also consider their cybersecurity infrastructure complex, with 52% highlighting this in the survey.
The study is based on a global survey of more than 5,100 security and privacy professionals across 27 markets. This includes more than 2,000 professionals from 13 markets in Asia-Pacific. The study aims to determine the most impactful measures teams can take to defend their organizations against the evolving threat landscape. Respondents, including professionals from companies in the Philippines, shared their approaches to updating and integrating their security architecture, detecting, and responding to threats, and staying resilient when disaster strikes.
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“Businesses across the globe, including here in the Philippines, have seen a huge change in their operating models, driven in large part by the pandemic,” said Kerry Singleton, managing director, Cybersecurity Asia-Pacific, Japan and Greater China at Cisco. “As they grapple with changes like a distributed workforce and digital-first interactions, it is imperative for them to be able to connect users seamlessly to the applications and data they need to access, in any environment and from any location. They need to achieve this while being able to control access and enforce the right security protection across networks, devices, and locations.”
Recognizing the need to address the issue, organizations in the Philippines are investing in modern cybersecurity technologies to improve their security posture, according to the study. Ninety percent (90%) of respondents in the Philippines said their company is investing in “Zero Trust” strategy, with 51% saying their organization is making steady progress with adopting it and 39% saying they are at a mature state of implementing it.
Zero Trust, SASE
In addition, 87% of respondents said their company is investing in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture, with 46% saying they are making good progress with adopting it and 41% saying their implementation of the same is at mature levels.
These two approaches (Zero Trust and SASE) are key to building a strong security posture for companies in the modern cloud-first and application-centric world. Organizations are facing multiple challenges while operating in this environment including, complexity in connecting users to applications and data across multiple cloud platforms, inconsistent security policies across disparate locations and networks, difficulty in verifying the identity of users and devices, lack of end-to-end visibility of their security infrastructure, etc.
The SASE architecture is widely seen as an effective way to address these challenges. SASE combines networking and security functions in the cloud to deliver secure access to applications anywhere users work. Zero-Trust, meanwhile, is a simple concept that involves verifying the identity of each user and device every time they access an organization’s network to reduce the security risk.
The value of cloud-based security architectures cannot be overstated. According to the study, organizations that have mature implementations of Zero Trust or SASE architectures are 35% more likely to report strong security operations than those with nascent implementations.