Cisco Report: Global Cyber Defense Scores 64 out of 100

Cisco released its "Relentless Defense" report on October 13, 2026, examining the organizational factors that shape enterprise cyber defense capabilities amid AI-driven threats, according to datanet.co.kr. The report surveyed 8,000 security professionals across 30 countries, 27% of whom were CISOs.

Global organizations averaged 64 out of 100 on cyber defense capability, while South Korea scored 58. Only 8% of organizations worldwide were classified as "Relentless Defenders," compared with 1% in South Korea. In the past year, 91% of global organizations and 80% of Korean organizations experienced a cyber incident that caused real business disruption, and 35% of global respondents said AI-related attacks were involved.

Coordination gaps were widespread: only 41% of global organizations said their security, networking and IT teams share visibility and tools as one team, a figure that fell to 24% in South Korea. Meanwhile, 43% of global respondents said their security metrics are too technical to persuade executives, and 40% in South Korea agreed. About 40% of global respondents said they spend more time collecting and connecting data scattered across systems than responding to actual threats, rising to 44% in South Korea.

Response speed remains a bottleneck. Just 21% of global organizations fully operationalize new security controls within six months, a share that rises to 52% among Relentless Defenders. Only 14% can update controls in real time when a new threat is detected and 26% within 24 hours, while about 60% take more than a day.

AI is helping on speed: 87% of respondents reported AI improved threat detection speed by at least 25%, and 85% reported the same for response and recovery speed. Yet fewer than half of organizations broadly deployed AI features in any one area, with network security most active and security operations and investigation lowest. A third of global organizations and a fifth of Korean organizations widely adopted AI agents in security operations, while 98% of respondents have adopted or plan to adopt them, held back by concerns over sensitive data exposure (41%), AI system compromise (40%) and external vendor data handling (37%).

Cisco also launched "Cisco Cloud Control" to consolidate scattered security data and opened its security tools as open source.