Cisco's Relentless Defense Report has found that 96% of organisations in India suffered a material, business-disrupting cyber incident over the past 12 months, with more than one in three of those incidents involving AI-enhanced attacks.
The report is based on a double-blind survey of 8,000 security professionals across 30 markets, including 1,000 respondents from India. It scored organisations on how completely they protect their environments, how quickly they detect and remediate threats, and what operational bottlenecks slow them down.
Despite the scale of exposure, only 8% of Indian organisations qualified for the report's best-performing category ,matching the global figure of 8%. Top-tier defenders were characterised by broad coverage, fast response times and unified team structures.
The study identified internal organisational friction as a greater impediment to improving cyber defences than technology gaps. This includes bureaucratic approval delays, fragmented data and disconnected teams. In India, only 40% of respondents said their security, networking and IT teams operate as a cohesive unit with shared tools and visibility.
Data access emerged as a separate but related problem. Around 44% of Indian organisations said they spend more time collecting and correlating information across systems than responding to actual threats, while 43% reported missing critical insights because of inaccessible data silos.
Communication gaps with senior leadership also featured. Nearly 49% of respondents said the security metrics they track are too technical to effectively influence executives, and 34% struggled to translate business metrics into information useful for decision-making.
On AI, more than nine in ten Indian security practitioners reported detection and response efficiency gains of at least 25% through AI tools. Nearly one in three said AI had significantly reduced operational workloads. Despite these gains, adoption remains cautious, with concerns over data exposure and third-party management cited as reasons for restraint.
Indian organisations recorded an average cybersecurity performance score of 66 out of 100, slightly above the global average of 64.
Source: Cisco Relentless Defense Report — cisco.com
