[Guide] Finding Best Security Outsourcing Alternative for Your Organization

Today, Cynet releases the Security Outsourcing Guide (download
here^[1]), providing IT Security
executives with clear and actionable guidance on the pros and cons
of each outsourcing alternative.

The reason for security outsourcing increasing momentum is that
unlike traditional IT, cyber threats evolve at a much faster
pace.

While relatively not long ago, AV and firewall covered most of
the standard organization’s cybersecurity needs, today no security
posture can be considered complete without a certain level of
incident response capabilities, alert prioritization, root cause
analysis and forensic investigation – and security professional
that are sufficiently qualified in this domain both are hard to
find as well as costly to retain.

But the challenge is not only in manning an active breach of
emergency mode style positions. Even the ongoing operation and day
to day management of monitoring and detection products is not
trivial.

Discerning between an alert that indicated a potential systemic
risk and an alert triggered by a minor IT misconfiguration is far
from trivial, and the challenge intensifies when recalling that
many small and mid-sized organizations rely on their IT staff to
part-time manage their cybersecurity without a dedicated team in
place.

In fact, even the most initial setup of the security stack
introduces potential difficulties. What products or technologies
should be prioritized as core components? Would it be EDR or Email
Protection? Is monitoring user activities on cloud apps more
important than protection from fileless malware?

The fact is that the lack of textbook answers to such questions
is a problem for many security decision-makers, making it a small
wonder that numerous outsource alternatives are offered today by
MSSP, Systems Integrators, IT Service Providers, and MDRs.

The Security
Outsourcing Guide^[2]
walks its reader through the wide range of outsourcing
alternatives, as well as points out the unique characteristics that
would make a certain organization a better fit for each.

The Companion divides security outsourcing to three
families:

• IR Oriented: this family includes outsourcing only IR
  related activities and features a wide range of variance from mere
  monitoring and notification through remote assistance and guidance
  to full forensic investigation and remediation activities. In terms
  of business models, it could be retainer-based or on-demand,
  Typical service providers of these families are MSSP and MDR.
• Ongoing Management Oriented: this family applies to
  organizations that would rather that even the continuous operation
  of their prevention and detection technologies will be carried out
  by a more skilled team and is mostly found among organizations with
  little security expertise and without a dedicated security team.
  Here, as well, there are various flavors that can range from
  management of just the more advanced detection and monitoring tools
  to full management of the entire security stack. Typical service
  providers of these families are MSSP, MDR, and MSP.
• Design and Set-Up Oriented: that’s the widest family in
  terms of outsourced functionalities and includes end-to-end
  outsourcing of the decision what product to choose and install, how
  to integrate them together, and which threats should be prioritized
  in terms in what products to invest. Typical service providers of
  these families are MSSP, MSP, and System Integrators.

In addition, the guide dedicates a chapter to the more common role
of the Virtual CISO or vCISO – an individual that has typically
gained a rich security background holding positions at
organizations with mature security posture and has thus acquired
significant knowledge on cyber technologies and services. As a
result, he\she is in an optimal position to advise less mature
organizations – often without a CISO themselves how to tailor the
best fit security for their needs.

Download the Security Outsource
Options Guide^[3]
here.