Almost all (96%) surveyed organizations consider security resilience crucial to their business while adopting and maturing security solutions or models such as zero trust, secure access service edge (SASE), and extended detection and response (XDR) can boost their resilience scores significantly – according to the latest Cisco Security Outcomes Report.

The networking giant surveyed over 4,700 security professionals across 26 countries and found 96% of the respondents saw security resilience as a top priority to defend against the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Cisco defines security resilience as “being able to protect the integrity of every aspect of your business so it can withstand, not just survive, unpredictable threats or changes and emerge stronger,” Cisco Secure SVP and GM Shailaja Shankar wrote in the report.

In the 2021 report, Cisco found 41% of surveyed organizations said they suffered a major security incident that impacted their business within the last two years, and in this year’s report, the number jumped to 62%.

The top types of those incidents were data or network breaches (51.5%), network or system outages (51.1%), ransomware attacks (46.7%), and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks (46.4%), according to the latest report.

Stakes are very high for businesses regarding security resilience, Cisco warns in the report, noting advanced security solution implementation has a major impact on the outcomes.

Cisco used a statistics technique called Item Response Theory to aggregate scores that capture a surveyed organization’s level of achievement across nine outcomes that Cisco defined to measure overall security resilience.

The report found companies that adopted a mature zero-trust model reported a 30% increase in resilience score compared to those that had none. The surveyed who had advanced XDR saw a 45% score increase over those without detection and response solutions. And those who implemented a mature and cloud-delivered SASE saw a 27% score boost.

In addition to those security solution adoptions, Cisco also identified establishing executive support, cultivating a culture of security, holding resources in reserve, simplifying hybrid-cloud environments, and taking security to the edge as key factors to elevate security resilience.

“The Security Outcomes Reports are a study into what works and what doesn’t in cybersecurity. The ultimate goal is to cut through the noise in the market by identifying practices that lead to more secure outcomes for defenders,” Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of security and collaboration at Cisco, said in a statement.