A third of global organisations have not planned a formal response to a cyberattack, according to a survey by RSA Security.
The research, which covered incident response and various forms of intelligence, unearthed a culture in which firms struggle to adopt the latest technologies and best practices in order to combat cybercrime.
Dave Martin, chief security officer at EMC, which owns RSA, said: "Organisations are struggling to gain visibility into operational risk across the business.
"As business has become increasingly digital, information security has become a key area of operational risk and while many organisations may feel they have a good handle on their security, it is still rarely tied in to a larger operational risk strategy, which limits their visibility into their actual risk profile."
Despite the lack of a response plan almost three-quarters of respondents had access to forensics for malware and endpoints, whilst 42% had network forensics which are said to be more sophisticated.
The survey did however highlight a lack of mitigation over common vulnerabilities, with only 40% making use of a vulnerability management scheme to stop hackers exploiting such flaws.
Ben Doyle, CISO of the security vendor Thales Australia and New Zealand, said: "People and process are more critical than the technology as it pertains to incident response.
"First, a security operations team must have clearly defined roles and responsibilities to avoid confusion at the crucial hour.
"But it is just as important to have visibility and consistent workflows during any major security crisis to assure accountability and consistency and help organizations improve response procedures over time."
