Running a successful business means earning and maintaining the trust of your would-be customers. This, in turn, means taking a robust approach to digital security. You might feel that you can take care of this in-house, especially if the operation is relatively small. But there are several good reasons to bring in an outside, specialist partner.
Identify the signs your in‑house model is stretched
To begin with, you’ll want to be on the lookout for symptoms that might indicate an overburdened in-house team. If a backlog of alerts has built up, then it might indicate that your team is unequipped to review or close them. If it takes a long time for a change to be approved and documented, or you’re suffering repeated failures and outages as a result of misconfigured settings, then you might also consider that your team is working at its limit.
Weigh compliance, audit readiness, and incident response time
By outsourcing, you’ll standardise things like policy, logging, and evidence gathering. This will leave you better prepared to deal with audits, and more likely to comply with regulations. At the same time, a third party will usually be able to respond much more quickly in the event of an incident.
Scope roles: where your team adds most value
You might vastly improve your team’s effectiveness by more tightly defining their role. You might leave your in-house staff to think about the broader structure of your systems, while external teams deal with day-to-day monitoring, patching, and configuration. Managed firewall services, for example, can help to keep threats at bay while you deal with other matters.
Set measurable outcomes before you move
If you’re going to be able to gauge the effectiveness of your external team, you’ll need to decide ahead of time what you expect of them. You might choose compliance pass rates, verified blocked events, and exposure windows as measurable Key Performance Indicators. But be sure to look for more qualitative feedback from your in-house team, too.
De‑risk the transition
Before you make the switch, you’ll need to ensure that you’re not left vulnerable as you move from one way of doing things to the next. You’ll need a comprehensive inventory, as well as rationalising (and streamlining) your rulesets.
Doing everything in stages will help to ensure that your coverage remains strong and uninterrupted at every stage of the process. Typically, this means introducing new rules and controls in observe-only mode, and comparing the new system to the old one, before moving to parallel enforcement, during which the old and the new controls are active simultaneously. Finally, you can make the full switch. This helps to ensure that errors are caught early, before you’re entirely committed to the changes.
