Poor cyber policy ‘puts companies at risk’

The lack of a coherent cyber security governance policy across the globe may be putting companies at greater risk of attack and jeopardising economic growth.

Research carried out by Cisco points towards inadequate global cyber governance which is ill-equipped to deal with emerging threats and geopolitical challenges.

A collaborative, multi-stakeholder cyber governance framework is required to sustain business innovation and economic growth on a global stage, the report finds. The research also indicates that an “innovation race” between security vendors and cyber attackers is accelerating, placing users and organisations at risk.

Cisco senior vice president, John N. Stewart said the security industry as a whole must step up to the growing challenge.

“Organisations cannot just accept that compromise is inevitable, even if it feels like it today. The technology industry must up the game and provide reliable and resilient products and services, and the security industry must provide vastly improved, yet meaningfully simplified, capabilities for detecting, preventing, and recovering from attacks,” said Mr Stewart.

Not helping the cyber fightback is a lack of skilled employees to lead the way.

“The question of ‘what do you do when you are compromised’ highlights the need for organisations to invest in integrated technologies that work in concert to reduce time to detection and remediation to a matter of hours; and then they should demand their vendors help them to reduce this metric to minutes,” said Cisco security business group principal engineer, Jason Brvenik.