C-level executives, board of directors, senior management, and other stakeholders want to get an insight into their enterprise’s cybersecurity risk management program. Enterprises can no longer deal with threats with their own in-house IT teams and need expert advice to protect against increasingly sophisticated threats. Thus, outsourcing to third-party service providers or entering into strategic alliances with industry-leading vendors is being witnessed today.

Professional security services are value-added services provided by firms to improve the security posture of organizations. They can include security advisory, implementation services, and technical services, such as assessment, benchmarking, design, planning, configuration, and incident response services. Professional security services fall under the Managed Security Services (MSS) portfolio. MSS are provided by Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to manage and monitor the security posture of their customers’ IT infrastructure. By availing these services, client organizations are often able to reduce expenditure on either customer-premises equipment or on in-house security specialists, while receiving effective security management. Professional security services are mainly customized according to the requirements of the customer. The end-customers avail these services on a project basis. On the other hand, MSS is standardized and offered over time.

With such expert advice, enterprises are able to focus on better decision making and deploy the right cybersecurity tools in place. Today, owing to a lack of in-house cybersecurity professionals, enterprises are increasingly facing challenges in managing their cybersecurity-related needs. This is more prevalent in the case of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), while also severely affecting Large Businesses (LBs) which have more complex and varying needs for cyber protection. In such a scenario, professional security service firms extend their expertise and know-how to deal with sophisticated threats and fill a skills gap.

Security teams nowadays not only have to deal with known threats occurring to their traditional on-premise infrastructure but also counter unknown threats in different environments, such as cloud, impulsive endpoint, Internet of Things (IoT), and hybrid environment, of which they may have limited knowledge.

The increasingly sophisticated threat landscape mentioned above, along with the shortage of resources, forces businesses to outsource some of their security operations to service providers to slash the cost and to focus on core activities, particularly among SMBs.

The involvement of C-suite into cybersecurity strategy is increasing year by year, reflecting the importance of cyber security, and it is now an area of concern and discussion among the key leaders in the company.

Regulations, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, PDPA (Malaysia and Singapore), and new cyber security laws in China and Vietnam are putting more pressure on cyber security teams and professionals.

Author: Divya Prasad