Organisations are facing a widening gap between the speed at which AI is accelerating cyber threats and the ability of security teams to coordinate their response, according to Cisco’s latest Relentless Defence Report.
The report finds that 91% of organisations globally and 96% in India experienced a material, business-disrupting cyber incident in the past 12 months. More than one-third of these incidents involved an AI-enhanced attack.
Cisco’s research suggests that the challenge is not solely technological. Among security practitioners struggling with their defences, around six in ten identify organisational capabilities—including coordination, approvals and access to data—as areas that could most improve their security posture.
The report assesses organisations across three dimensions: coverage, or how comprehensively they can protect their environments; speed, or how quickly they can detect, respond to and remediate threats; and friction, or the organisational factors that slow them down.
The global average score is 64 out of 100, compared with 66 in India. Only 8% of organisations globally and in India qualify as “Relentless Defenders”, the report’s highest-performing category.
Coordination and data remain challenges
The report points to organisational silos as a significant source of friction for security teams.
Only 41% of organisations globally and 40% in India say their security, networking and IT teams operate as a single team with shared visibility and tooling.
Data access is another constraint. 40% globally and 44% in India say they spend more time collecting and correlating data across systems than addressing the actual threat. Meanwhile, 39% globally and 43% in India say critical insights are missed because relevant data is inaccessible.
The report also identifies challenges in communicating security performance to business leadership. Nearly half of Indian organisations surveyed, 49%, say the metrics they measure are too technical to persuade executives, while 34% struggle to translate business metrics into information that can influence decision-making.
AI accelerates security response.
While AI introduces new security risks, the research also points to its potential to improve defenders’ response capabilities.
More than 90% of practitioners in India report at least a 25% improvement in detection and response from AI, while nearly one-third say AI is significantly reducing operational workloads.
However, fewer than half of organisations have extensively deployed AI-powered security capabilities. Adoption is particularly limited in security operations and investigation. Around 40% of organisations in India have extensively deployed AI agents in security operations.
Concerns around data exposure, compromised systems and third-party handling continue to affect adoption. Only 66% of organisations in India are very confident that they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent.
Sunil Potti, SVP and general manager, Security, Observability, and Data Platform, Cisco, said security and resilience need to be built into the foundation of AI adoption.
“You cannot govern what you cannot see, and you cannot trust what you cannot govern,” Potti said. “This unified approach to AI trust is the only way for organisations and consumers to fully embrace the promise of this technology.”
What differentiates the Relentless Defenders?
According to Cisco, organisations classified as Relentless Defenders demonstrate stronger organisational coordination and AI governance alongside their security capabilities.
83% of Relentless Defenders operate as a single coordinated security team with shared visibility and tools across security, network and infrastructure, compared with 37% of other defenders.
Similarly, 86% apply consistent controls to AI agents and non-human identities, compared with 37% of other defenders. They are also more likely to express confidence in responding to compromised AI agents, with 77% reporting high confidence compared with 51% of other defenders.
The report also finds that 25% of Relentless Defenders say AI improved threat-detection speed by more than 100%, compared with 7% of other defenders.
Among organisations that increased security spending, 71% of Relentless Defenders in India reported a fall in incidents, compared with 39% of other organisations, according to the report.
The Relentless Defence Report is based on a double-blind survey of 8,000 security professionals across 30 markets, conducted in April and May 2026. The analysis was conducted by independent third party Satori Experience.