Outsourcing IT Security Infrastructure Is Like Hiring a Good Lawn Service Company
By Jay Bretzmann
Categories: Security Intelligence & Analytics
Many organizations struggle to find both the skilled resources and the funding required to deploy on-premises security intelligence solutions. The easy alternative is simply outsourcing the activity, but participants in certain industries are reluctant to relinquish control for safeguarding their trade secrets and customer private data. One significant network breach can damage the brand reputation and potentially result in business failure when handled poorly. If you’re one of these organizations, you want to maintain a higher degree of control but have heretofore had few options outside of doing everything yourself or hiring professional services consultants or managed service providers.
Why Outsourcing?
Cloud-based security intelligence solutions can help you address these two main pain points using a hybrid model. Clients benefit from outsourcing the infrastructural work associated with deploying and maintaining a security intelligence or next-generation security information and event management (SIEM) solution and save capital budget expenses by easily integrating a SIEM platform. This also helps reduce your time to value since experienced professionals use the cloud resources for delivering the service — typically in a period of days rather than weeks or months.Outsourcing your security intelligence infrastructure to maximize existing IT resources provides a similar benefit to hiring a lawn service company to keep your estate grounds looking good. Beyond regularly scheduled mowings, the turf experts also troubleshoot issues with moss, grubs and other pests that cause bare spots so you have more time to watch the game. Security infrastructure vendors similarly apply bug-fix releases and vulnerability patches to improve the efficiency of, and remove potential risks in, IT security software. Lawn service vendors apply fertilizer to properly feed the grass throughout the year, and they aerate and overseed in the fall to support new growth next spring — similar to the way in which infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors transparently grow appliance processing power or add storage capacity to support business growth.
This new model allows you to achieve greater security visibility by focusing all your available resources on monitoring for evidence of attacks, fraud and advanced threats, as well as performing any necessary compliance reporting. Your team remains in control and must plan for and initiate all remediation activities. Of course, you can also work with security services to help monitor the network even if it’s just for gap periods like weekend coverage. And there’s nothing like doing a little pre-planning around emergency response services, including outsourcing on-call resources for a faster and better-orchestrated response should lightning strike.
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