It’s a tough world for businesses right now. You have the added responsibility of protecting yourself and your customers from cybersecurity threats and attacks while maintaining a perfect IT infrastructure.
According to a report, in the first half of 2019, data breaches exposed over 4.1 billion records. The continuously rising number of cyberattacks are a major concern for business owners worldwide.
The cybersecurity threat landscape is evolving at a much more rapid pace than organizations are prepared for and attackers continue to target vulnerable organizations with weak cybersecurity infrastructures.
Having an in-house IT security team is a luxury not all businesses can count on or afford because talented professionals are hard to find and expensive. This is one of the major reasons why small and mid-sized companies often opt to outsource their security services.
Let’s take a look at how outsourcing security services can offer many benefits to organizations and boost efficiency.
Risks of Cyberattacks and Security
Attackers are leveraging state-of-the-art technologies to create smarter and more difficult-to-trace methods to infiltrate a company’s network security and gain unauthorized access to their sensitive data.
This sensitive information could be customer databases, personal information, credit card info, credentials, client data, financial information, employee records, confidential contracts, or intellectual property (IP).
While it’s necessary to implement and maintain strong security frameworks throughout your organization, it’s not an easy task, especially for SMBs. As soon as organizations identify and mitigate a security vulnerability in their system for a potential security breach, another one crops up leaving the business vulnerable to a cyberattack.
Apart from this, security management in a company is a time and money-intensive process. Be it hiring the right people, or buying the latest security tools to safeguard your organization against potential threats, handling security risks is a difficult task for SMBs, particularly because they usually can’t shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars on security alone.
How can SMBs protect their organizations?
A great option SMBs might want to consider is outsourcing some of their cybersecurity services. Not only will this take the pressure and stress off of their business but also provide many other benefits too.
7 Benefits of Outsourcing Security Services
Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing security services for your company:
1. Diversified Experience & Layered Security Best Practices
Security service support comes with years of experience, knowledge, and an extensive set of tools to monitor security threats, regularly update systems, and mitigate vulnerabilities at an affordable price.
Professional security services help you maintain the right security layers including automated software patching, DNS security, firewalls, anti-malware, anti-phishing software, password managers, identify and access management (IAM) tools, and more to reduce the risk of exposing data to unauthorized users.
Having diversified and certified experience, outsourced security professionals have seen a lot more security vulnerabilities that can possibly exist in a system than your in-house security team.
In a nutshell, the biggest benefit is that they bring in more experience. So, they’re likely to be more vigilant and responsive to security issues that can crop up in the future.
2. Cost
Training and maintaining an effective security team in-house can be time-consuming and costly. Additionally, investing in state-of-the-art security hardware and software can also lead to a lot of added expenses.
Outsourcing security services allows you to access highly skilled professionals empowered with the latest technology to maintain security in your organization. That too without breaking the bank! These service providers can spread the costs of these tools and hardware across multiple customers, reducing your overall expenditures for the same level of service.
Right from the costs of risk analysis, threat modeling, security applications, appliances, and equipment, outsourcing security services proves to be a much more cost-efficient method than in-house security solutions.
This also allows you to reallocate budget resources elsewhere in the business, so it’s truly a win-win situation. Moreover, outsourcing security converts fixed IT budgets into variable costs and enables you to budget more efficiently.
In simple terms, you only pay for what you use and when you need it. Unlike with in-house security where you have to maintain and pay the costs even during downtime.
3. Level the Playing Field
Most small and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) can’t afford to match the level of security with in-house support services in larger corporations.
Outsourcing security management can help small companies level the playing field in business by accessing top-notch security technology, and expertise that large corporates enjoy.
The best part about outsourcing security services is that you don’t even have to invest millions exclusively for all of these tools and technology.
Typically, outsourcing services come in a cost-effective package and an economy of scale can give your organization a significant advantage. Then you can focus on other aspects of your company without having to worry about maintaining security levels with your competitors.
4. Reduce Risk
Maintaining security in a company isn’t a cakewalk. It entails multiple aspects of risk, such as competition, government regulations, markets, financial conditions, changing technology, etc.
Outsourcing security providers manage most of the business risk that comes for you, with specific industry knowledge and expertise, especially about compliance and regulatory issues.
Managed IT support also reduces the chances of security breaches significantly. Outsourcing providers build customized risk management strategies that are apt for your business model and needs. They evaluate all risk areas and determine a plan to follow in the event of security breaches, which helps reduce downtime and costs by a significant margin.
Outsourcing providers also focus on maintaining regular backups to prevent data loss and help you implement the best security practices to meet your needs.
5. Scalability
It’s certainly impractical to expect your development team to handle all security vulnerabilities, or hiring a team of security professionals for one project and then training those individuals to perform their tasks every now and then.
What if you want to pause the project for a few months? What if you have downtime for a few weeks?
You’d still be paying a large chunk of your budget to an in-house security team. However, with outsourcing security management, you can be flexible.
One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing security services is that it can be done on an “as-needed” basis. It gives businesses the ability to quickly scape up with an already trained and knowledgeable staff that can handle the dynamic volume of business.
Depending on your company size and needs, it’s possible to easily scale up and down to a different number of security experts as needed when outsourcing.
6. Quickly Deploy New Technology
An efficient outsourced IT organization will have the right talent and resources to begin and manage new projects quickly.
Managing and deploying the same project in-house might take a considerable amount of time to hire the right people, provide training, and offer the required tools and software support they need.
However, outsourced IT services come bearing years of experience and knowledge in various projects. So you can save time and money from the beginning of the project without much hassle.
7. Stay Focused
Having a professional cybersecurity team allows you to focus on other important aspects of your business: growing and supporting your business, managing operations, expanding marketing, perfecting the product development process - not troubleshooting hardware or software and user issues.
With an outsourced IT team, you can collectively focus all of your energy, effort, and time on pushing your business to achieve your goals and not get distracted by other decisions.
Don’t let security services be the bottleneck that holds your company back. Instead, get an outsourced security expert team that lets you do what you do best - run your business effectively to grow more revenue.
Takeaways
With new cybersecurity threats emerging every day, it’s important for businesses to stay vigilant and maintain a healthy security posture. However, it’s challenging for SMBs to build and manage a robust security model, especially because of limited budgets and efficiency.
In these cases, the ideal option for you to consider is outsourcing your security services. This will not only help you cut costs but also maintain stringent security policies while you focus on business growth and management.
This post was originally published at CypressDataDefense.com.
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