KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian organisations are struggling to align their security, networking and IT teams, while gaps in data access and performance measurement make it harder to respond effectively to cyber threats, according to new research from Cisco.
The study, entitled Relentless Defense Report, found that only 43% of organisations in Malaysia have security, networking, and IT teams working as one unit with shared visibility and tools.
The disconnect extends to the boardroom, with 43% struggling to translate business metrics into decision-guiding information, while 29% say their security measurements are too technical to convince executives.
Further, the study also found that data access is another hurdle, with nearly half (49%) spending more time collecting and correlating data across systems than dealing with actual threats, while 40% say critical insights are missed because the data remains out of reach.
A further 34% have no consistent way to measure security performance.
Cisco said any organisation that could not coordinate a human response in a day will struggle to govern autonomous agents that act in seconds.
The study, which examines the critical infrastructure for the AI era, finds that the organisations best at defence do not rely on a single strength.
They combine broad coverage, fast response and a team working as one, without operational bottlenecks.
The report examines how security practitioners are adapting to a threat landscape being reshaped by AI.
The report scored organisations on how completely they can protect their environment, how quickly they can detect, respond to, and remediate a threat, and what slows them down.
The global average score in Malaysia is 65 out of 100. Only 8% globally and in Malaysia qualified in the best-performing group Cisco calls Relentless Defenders.
Cisco Malaysia managing director Chee Kheong Lee said AI has fundamentally raised the stakes for cyber defence.
“In a post-Mythos era, the speed of defence is driven by operational agility, not technology alone.
“The organisations that stay ahead will be those that embed security into how they operate, treat it as more than a compliance exercise, and break down operational silos so the right people can make the right decisions at the right time,” he said.
The report identifies organisational friction as a key barrier to stronger cyber defence.
Cisco said security teams cannot solve friction alone.
Ownership, approvals and silos sit across IT, procurement and executive leadership, which is why they persist.
When teams cannot act as one, decision rights are unclear, and data is fragmented, making AI deployment and governance increasingly complex.
More than eight in ten practitioners report detection and response gains of at least 25%, and more than one in three say it is significantly reducing operational burden.
Yet fewer than half of organisations have extensively deployed AI-powered security capabilities.
Adoption is highest in network security, data security and privacy, and security operations, and lowest in identity and access management.
Over one-third have extensively deployed AI agents in security operations.
Concerns about data exposure, compromised systems, and third-party handling, among others, hold them back.
Only 53% are very confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent.
Globally, Relentless Defenders do more to reduce friction and control the AI they are developing.
They are also more likely to report stronger AI outcomes in security operations — not because they spend more, but because they lead across the organisational dimensions that enable security teams to act quickly.
The study finds that 83% of organisations operate as a single coordinated security team with shared visibility and tools across security, network and infrastructure, versus 37% of all other defenders.
86% apply consistent controls to AI agents and non-human identities, versus 37%. 77% are very confident they could detect and respond to a compromised AI agent, versus 51%.
It finds that 25% report AI helped improve threat-detection speed by more than 100%, versus 7%.
Among organisations that increased security spending, the Relentless Defenders were nearly twice as likely to see incidents fall (71% vs. 39%).