96% Indian firms hit by cyber incidents in past year; internal silos major hurdle: Cisco report

As many as 96% of organisations in India suffered a material, business-disrupting cyber incident over the past 12 months, with more than one in three involving artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced attacks, according to a report released by technology major Cisco.

The study highlighted that internal organisational friction - including bureaucratic approval delays, fragmented data, and disconnected teams - represents a greater impediment to strengthening cyber defences than technological limitations.

The findings are part of Cisco's 'Relentless Defense Report', based on a double-blind survey of 8,000 security professionals across 30 markets, including 1,000 respondents from India.


The report evaluated organisations on how completely they protect their environments, the speed at which they detect and remediate threats and the operational bottlenecks that slow them down.

India recorded an average score of 66 out of 100, marginally above the global average of 64. However, only 8% of organisations in India qualified for the best-performing category, matching the global figure of 8%.

These top-tier defenders combined broad coverage, rapid response times and unified team operations. Among entities that increased security spending, these top performers were nearly twice as likely to see incidents fall.

The study identified operational silos as a critical vulnerability. In India, only 40% of respondents stated that their security, networking and IT teams function as a cohesive unit with shared tooling and visibility.

Communication gaps with executive leadership were also prominent. Nearly half (49%) of Indian respondents said the metrics they measure are too technical to persuade company executives, while 34% struggled to translate business metrics into actionable decision-making information. Additionally, 26% reported having no consistent framework to evaluate security performance.

Data access constraints further impeded defence capabilities, with 44% of Indian organisations spending more time collecting and correlating data across systems than countering actual threats and 43% reporting that critical insights were missed due to unreachable data silos.

On AI adoption, more than nine in ten practitioners in India acknowledged detection and response efficiency gains of at least 25% through AI, while nearly one in three said it significantly reduced operational burdens.

Despite these benefits, comprehensive deployment remains cautious. Four in ten Indian organisations have extensively deployed AI agents in security operations, hindered by concerns surrounding data exposure, system compromises and third-party management.

"Democratising AI - enabling every person and organisation to harness its potential - demands that we build trust into its foundation. That trust is only realised when security and resilience become inseparable. You cannot govern what you cannot see, and you cannot trust what you cannot govern. This unified approach to AI trust is the only way for organisations and consumers to fully embrace the promise of this technology," said Sunil Potti, SVP and General Manager, Security, Observability and Data Platform, Cisco.