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Across industries, competition for cybersecurity talent is stiff— thousands of companies seek to hire cybersecurity professionals, yet the global cybersecurity workforce is short 2.72 million workers. The cybersecurity talent pool would have to grow by 65% to meet this demand.
This skills gap must be taken seriously. Having the right cyber talent in your corner is the first step to ensuring your cybersecurity posture is sufficient and effective—especially in the world of financial services, where a breach can expose sensitive customer data.
To bridge the cybersecurity skills gap, outsourcing is a savvy option. Outsourcing cybersecurity operations minimizes the need to hire, train, and maintain a full-scale in-house cyber team, allowing organizations to run leaner and cut costs. Additionally, it can bring greater expertise and efficiency to your cybersecurity operations.
Even if your organization can find and hire cybersecurity talent, there’s no guarantee they’ll have specialized experience implementing the specific tools you need. Because of the skills shortage, organizations often feel pressure to hire any cybersecurity talent that walks in the door. Then, they find themselves with a staff full of generalists. When it comes time to implement a new tool or start a new cloud project, these cybersecurity professionals are often learning on-the-go.
Having a generalist implement a specific tool for the first time is a risky move for your infrastructure. In today’s world, misconfiguration can open the door for hackers. By outsourcing implementation and configuration to a managed service provider (MSP), these risks are greatly minimized. MSPs are full of specialized experts—people who have extensive experience across countless organizations. These professionals come with deep expertise, vetted processes, and proven standards.
Specialized expertise is of particular importance to financial services organizations taking their first steps into the cloud. Migration requires moving applications, infrastructure, and data from existing data centers to a public or hybrid-cloud environment. Far too often, organizations assume one of two things: either that the cloud is resilient by default, or that the cloud provider is handing all things security. Resiliency can be achieved in the cloud, but capabilities are not turned on by default. An MSP can ensure configuration is done properly—without skipping over important security measures.
Outsourcing can also save your organization time and money. By working with an MSP that’s already staffed with cybersecurity experts, your company no longer must search for, interview, and train new cyber talent. Instead, that time and energy can go into servicing customers or improving your key differentiators. Managed services also offer economies of scale. Outsourcing breeds cost efficiencies because your partner is buying in bulk for thousands of users, then allows you to reap the cost saving benefits.
Outsourcing cybersecurity operations also enables 24/7 monitoring—even for small and midsized businesses. Between cryptocurrencies and global markets, people are trading around-the-clock, requiring constant monitoring. But it’s difficult and expensive to keep eyes on glass 24/7 with an in-house team. By outsourcing cybersecurity operations, though, you don’t have to worry about a lapse in monitoring. ECI, for instance, has a 365x24x7 Security Operations Center—one that’s staffed with experts that have the experience needed to triage threats and respond to events in a timely manner, no matter when they arise.
If you’re struggling to hire full-time cybersecurity talent, you’re not alone. Hiring, training, and maintaining an in-house cybersecurity team is always difficult, but it’s particularly challenging now.
The good news is that outsourcing can help address the current talent shortage. Not only can you access cyber talent with deep expertise, but you can save time and money in the process. No wonder global spending for managed security services is expected to grow to $43.7 billion by 2026—nearly double the figure for last year.
Without access to the right cybersecurity talent, your organization may be left vulnerable. Don’t wait until tomorrow to find the talent you need now. Look into outsourcing your cybersecurity operations. For more information on ECI’s cybersecurity services, get in touch with our team today.
