Forty-seven percent of cybersecurity technologies used by companies in Singapore are considered outdated by security and privacy professionals working at those organisations, according to Cisco’s new study.
The Security Outcomes Study Volume 2 report also reveals that Singapore respondents consider their cybersecurity infrastructure unreliable (44%) and complex (55%).
However, the good news is that companies in Singapore are investing in modern cybersecurity technologies and approaches to address this and improve their security posture. The majority of them are investing in a ‘Zero Trust’ strategy, with 52% making steady progress to adopt it while 40% are at a mature state of implementing it.
Besides that, 87% of Singapore respondents said their company is investing in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. Nearly one in two (46%) claimed they are making good progress adopting SASE, while 41% said that their implementation is at mature levels.
The SASE architecture is widely seen as an effective way to address these challenges. It combines networking and security functions in the cloud to deliver secure access to applications anywhere users work.
Meanwhile, Zero Trust is a simple concept that involves verifying the identity of each user and device every time they access an organisation’s network to reduce the security risk.
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According to Cisco, SASE and Zero Trust are key to building a strong security posture for companies in the modern cloud-first and application-centric world. These two approaches equip organisations with high visibility across users and applications and hold the capabilities to detect and respond to threats efficiently.
The value of cloud-based security architectures cannot be overstated. According to the study, organisations that have mature implementations of Zero Trust or SASE architectures are 35% more likely to report strong security operations than those with nascent implementations.
“Businesses across the globe, including here in Singapore, have seen a huge change in their operating models, driven in large part by the pandemic,” says Kerry Singleton, managing director, Cybersecurity, Asia Pacific, Japan and China at Cisco.
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He adds: “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.”
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