Indian Firms Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks Despite Rising AI Adoption

According to Cisco's 'Relentless Defense Report', a staggering 96% of Indian organizations suffered a material, business-disrupting cyber incident over the past year. The report, based on a double-blind survey of 8,000 security professionals across 30 markets, including 1,000 respondents from India, found that internal organizational friction was a greater impediment to strengthening cyber defenses than technological limitations.

The study highlighted that only 40% of Indian respondents stated that their security, networking, and IT teams functioned as a cohesive unit with shared tooling and visibility. Communication gaps with executive leadership were also prominent, with nearly half (49%) of Indian respondents saying the metrics they measured were too technical to persuade company executives.

The report identified operational silos as a critical vulnerability, with 44% of Indian organizations spending more time collecting and correlating data across systems than countering actual threats. Despite these challenges, over nine in ten practitioners in India acknowledged detection and response efficiency gains of at least 25% through AI adoption.