76% of companies in Taiwan have encountered major information security incidents! Cisco reveals the biggest obstacle is not technology but "it"

A Cisco survey pointed out that "organizational capabilities" are one of the main obstacles affecting the effectiveness of information security defense. (Reuters)

[Reporter Qiu Qiaozhen/Taipei Report] With the rapid development of AI, the information security threats faced by enterprises are becoming increasingly complex, but the key to affecting the efficiency of information security defense may not be just technical issues. A Cisco survey shows that about 60% of professionals facing information security defense difficulties believe that the main obstacle to defense effectiveness is not insufficient technology, but issues such as organizational collaboration capabilities within the enterprise, including cross-department coordination, sign-off processes, and data access.

The latest "Continuous Defense Report" released by Cisco shows that in the past 12 months, 91% of enterprises around the world have encountered serious information security incidents that have had a significant impact on their business, and the proportion in Taiwan has reached 76%. Among them, more than one-third of the incidents globally and in Taiwan involved AI-enhanced attacks.

This report evaluates enterprise security defense capabilities from aspects such as protection coverage, threat detection and response speed, and obstacles that affect defense efficiency. The results showed that with a perfect score of 100, Taiwanese companies scored an average of 59 points, and only 3% were in the best-performing "Relentless Defenders" group, lower than the global rate of 8%.

Looking further at internal collaboration within enterprises, only 41% of enterprises worldwide said that security, network and IT teams can operate as a single team and share information visibility and tools, and only 27% of enterprises in Taiwan said.

In addition, 49% of respondents in Taiwan believe that information security measurement indicators are too technical to convince senior corporate executives; 50% said that it is difficult to transform business indicators into information that can influence decision-making. Data access is also an issue. 43% of Taiwanese respondents said that teams spend more time collecting and comparing data across systems than actually dealing with security threats. Another 38% have missed key insights due to inability to obtain data.

On the other hand, AI has gradually become a tool for enterprises to improve the efficiency of information security defense. More than 80% of information security personnel around the world said that AI has improved threat detection and response efficiency by at least 25%, and more than a quarter believe that AI has significantly reduced the burden of information security operations.

Among them, the field with the highest AI introduction rate is network security, and the lowest is information security maintenance and incident investigation. However, the latter is the area where AI can most directly reduce the burden on the information security team.

According to the survey, only about one-third of enterprises have widely deployed AI Agents in information security operations. Concerns such as data leakage, system intrusion and third-party data processing are still the main factors hindering the introduction of AI; only 54% of the respondents have high confidence in the organization's ability to detect and deal with intruded AI Agents.

As for companies with better defense performance, Cisco found that 83% of the world's "continuous defenders" can operate as highly collaborative teams, compared with only 37% of other defenders. Another 86% of continuous defenders adopt consistent security control measures for AI agents and non-human identities, compared with 37% of other defenders.

There are also differences in the effectiveness of security defenses among companies that increase their security budgets. According to a Cisco survey, 71% of "continuous defenders" worldwide said that security incidents have decreased, compared with 39% of other defenders and only 22% of Taiwanese companies.

In this regard, Sunil Potti, senior vice president of Cisco, believes that to promote the popularization of AI and allow everyone and every enterprise to realize its potential, the key is to build trust from the foundation. Only by closely integrating information security with resilience can this trust be truly realized. This report was conducted from April to May 2026, covering 30 markets around the world including Taiwan, and interviewed a total of 8,000 information security professionals.