Why You Should Outsource SecOps to Experts!

Today businesses are witnessing an unprecedented expansion in their geographical footprint, yet increasingly becoming digital and their information security needs a lot of catching up to do. When your digital assets are increasing in number, and are spread across environments, and secured in an isolated manner, a serious security operational challenge emerges.

On top of this, hackers, cyber criminals and syndicates have built a powerful and successful business model in causing damage, disruptions and to bring disrepute to your businesses, regardless of the size and industry you belong to.

A sound cybersecurity strategy needs to be in place that will protect your information systems wherever they are. You will need to monitor, manage all your digital assets centrally, from a SOC (Security Operations Center) to gain visibility to prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats around the clock.

SecOps teams are tasked with monitoring and protecting the organization’s assets including intellectual property, personnel data, business systems, and brand integrity. The SOC team implements the organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy and acts as the central point of collaboration in coordinated efforts to monitor, assess, and defend against cyberattacks.

SecOps is a focused operation that requires skills that are quite different from what an organization’s core and critical operations require, therefore it makes absolute sense to leave it to those who consider it their core business.

Let us talk about the Operations Challenge

Businesses are gearing up to meet the challenges in growing, becoming more competitive and building brands and reputation. They need to focus on what their core is and not on operations that require skills other than what needs to be the core focus.

The answer to this challenge lies in letting the SecOps be run by a third-party rather than trying to do this in-house.

Let us see why

1. The Great Talent Crunch

If there can be one reason why you should outsource SecOps, this is the one.

Setting up and running a SOC in-house, requires hiring skilled employees who are trained and certified with the relevant security tools (SIEM). Today, hiring and retaining any technical talent is giving sleepless nights to end user organisations. Unfortunately, this problem gets heightened in the cybersecurity domain where the demand for talent outnumbers the supply several times. Cyber attackers never take a day off and you need 24X7 monitoring, the speediest responses to detect and remediate potential threats. The outsourced SecOps provider will guarantee SLA based delivery having access to motivated, certified cyber professionals around the clock, shared threat intelligence, elasticity, reduced barriers to entry and at much lower ongoing costs. Most organizations have a limited cyber security budget and outsourcing the SOC makes good business sense.

2. Passing the Buck

In-house teams undergo an expensive “learning curve” as new employees take time to settle down, master the tool and their needs will trespass on other departments resulting in “passing the buck”. Teams may recommend tools that may not get budget approval resulting in raised eyebrows and eventually an incomplete and compromised SOC.

3. Access to Expertise

With a deep understanding of your environments, you can expect to have answers to all your questions from your vendor teams. Security is a journey, not a destination. The outsourced security team gets aligned with your security goals and evolve and mature your SOC, without your organisation having to spend on expensive skill upgradations.

Having seasoned experts manage your operations is essential for success. When it has been done hundreds of times, outsourced SecOps teams have learnt how to avoid the pitfalls of implementations and to maximize efficiencies throughout the process. In-house SecOps can take up to four times as long compared to an outsourced one, simply because of lack of skills of the tool and unfamiliarity with best practices.

With in-house team, your employees at best to work to meet their KRAs, but your outsourced SecOps team delivers as per the SLA.

4. Continuous Improvement

The outsourced SecOps team works closely with your Infosec team to develop a security strategy customized to your unique environment with regular security posture reviews and track the progress to continuously improve your security posture.

5. Leveraging on Experience

Outsourced SecOps takes advantage of optimized services based on trends and the detection at other customers’ environments. They have access to Threat Intel from multiple sources, and are more proactive in preventing, patching and detecting threats. While an in-house SecOps requires time and investment, and ultimately is likely to fall short of an optimized, integrated solution. In-house SecOps relies on a limited set of data, and there are many benefits from the best practices an outsourced they bring from the experience of serving several other customers.

6. Advantages of Scalability & Flexibility

Needs of all businesses are the same and they never remain the same. For instance, a small business may still require a team of single security experts, but when the service is outsourced, the needs are pooled with those of others. Outsourced SecOps is much more effective through collaboration and developing solutions together to respond quickly. There is the benefit of access to additional resources. This can range from immediately in the event of an incident or the more gradual scaling of a business and consequential data to protect. With quick and effective response times to cyber threats, across all attack surfaces, it can save your company millions of dollars from legal costs, reputational damage, customer churn and business disruption.

7. Finally, outsourced SecOps is all about outcomes

Do not focus so much about the tools your provider brings in, instead, focus on the outcomes. Ask them how they are protecting your business? What is their Incident Response plan? How fast do they act when threats are detected? How efficiently will they use Threat Intel to proactively protect your assets? How often do they carry out Threat Hunting? If you get satisfactory answers here, no need to be worried. Then you can ask about the tools.

Your outsourced SecOps combines technology, processes and people prowess to deliver on timely defence and mitigations all the time. SOC is not DIY for every enterprise.

Originally Published on Cymune blog.