There are not many things for an online business or a business operating online than being able to manage their cybersecurity services. The problem is that this requires specialists and advanced tools, both of which small enterprises are not able to afford. Making your own, in-house cybersecurity team would be incredibly expensive and inconvenient, which is why the majority of businesses go with managed security services.
In other words, it’s not that you couldn’t provide yourself with adequate in-house protection. It’s that it would cost you so much to get anywhere near this level.
Here are some cost-benefits of managed security services that you need to understand.
- Outsourcing your cybersecurity
Not micromanaging a field you don’t understand enough will save you from a world of anxiety. Not only will you be inefficient at it, but you’ll spend hours upon hours doing this and conducting research without being as good or as efficient as a veteran manager.
This way, you’re also getting easier access to 24/7 coverage without having to organize it yourself. Otherwise, you would have to find people willing to work overnight or hire people from different time zones. Sure, neither of the two is very problematic, but it’s a lot easier just to outsource.
According to specialists from Virtualarmour.com, the most important thing is that you don’t have to go through the trouble of vetting experts. By outsourcing, you can rest assured knowing that you always have experts on the task.
- Reducing overall IT costs
Another massive perk is that there’s no need for in-house security experts. This will reduce your overall IT costs, seeing as how you’re only paying experts for the services they provide or the number of hours they tend to your business, not what their agency is paying them.
This is a scalable solution based on your needs, which means that it will drastically impact the way you see your IT. You can always increase your plan or ask to have more people assigned to your task. You can also ask for less.
It is a lower upfront investment in security infrastructure but it’s also a method to simplify your payroll. This way, you get more predictable monthly expenses. This is also a way to get better value when trying to integrate IT and cybersecurity to protect your business.
- Enhancing security posture
The next thing you need to understand is the relevance of having access to advanced threat intelligence. Licenses for cybersecurity threat platforms are not completely inexpensive, which is why companies that are not entirely in IT security might not find them worth it. This means that you have to compromise on your tools or drastically increase the cost of running an in-house department.
Regular updates and patch management are far more reliable with a dedicated and experienced team. Aside from this, you also get a proactive threat detection and response.
These teams also manage comprehensive risk management strategies, which gives you a far more systemic approach to this issue as a whole.
- Focusing on core business activities
This focus on core business activities is actually freeing up internal resources so that you can allocate them elsewhere. No, outsourcing isn’t free, but it makes managing resources easier.
Have you ever played a strategy video game? In some, you have just one or two resources, while in others, you have dozens. While the total cost of things you can buy with these resources may be the same, the management is not.
You also get a chance to organize a better allocation of IT staff to business-critical tasks. This reduces distraction from non-core activities, which directly enhances the productivity and efficiency of your employees. It’s all about giving people tasks that they’re made to tend to.
- Ensuring regulatory compliance
These teams have a lot of expertise in industry-specific regulations, which is incredibly important. Making an oversight here is easy, and this oversight might end up being incredibly expensive for your enterprise. These fees are a nuisance, but at the same time, they cause trouble.
You also want someone to conduct regular audits and compliance checks. Sure, monitoring threats in real-time is important but you also need to see a bigger picture from time to time. By doing so, you’re getting access to more comprehensive reporting and documentation. You’re also ensuring that there’s a reduced risk of fines and penalties. It takes so little to be so much safer.
- Minimizing risk and downtime
Having specialists on your team will ensure fast incident response times. Sure, most of it is already automated and controlled by AI-based platforms, but at the same time, having managed services will cut the time by which your problem is tended to by a real human technician by a significant margin.
This way, you get access to a continuous monitoring and alerting system. There’s also disaster recovery and business continuity planning, which means that even if an incident happens, it won’t be a disaster.
This way, you’ll also have a reduced impact of security breaches. It’s a contingency plan that you’ll know is always there.
- Improving flexibility and scalability
What you really want are customizable security solutions. You don’t want protection; you want protection, something that’s made for your enterprise and fills all your needs/covers all your threats.
Previously, we’ve already mentioned scalability in terms of your finances but easily scaling up or down as business needs change is far more important than that. It means being able to adjust to your workload without having to restructure your entire enterprise.
By adapting to emerging threats and technologies, you’ll always be ahead of the curve but this means something different every single year. With that in mind, it’s in your best interest to make your business future-proof.
Wrap up
The last thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that while you may be able to do it all in-house, there’s not a single reason for you to try and do so. There’s so much work to be done, and letting someone else do it is a completely fine thing to do. Not only that, but it might also be the right thing to do. By finding people who are experienced and trained in this field,
