To outsource or not to outsource: Automation is the key

In a nutshell, cybersecurity workloads can be described as having too many tasks to complete with too few resources available. While the global talent shortage is still ongoing, the question for organizations remains whether to expand in-house security teams or outsource security services to increase their cyber readiness. 

Security teams are juggling too many balls

A common challenge for security teams is vulnerability management; many simply cannot keep pace with the number of vulnerabilities being found on a daily basis. Last year, ethical hackers discovered more than 65,000 vulnerabilities, an increase of 21% compared with 2021. As a result, 66% of security leaders interviewed by Ponenom said that their backlog contains over 100,000 vulnerabilities. 

Compounding the challenge, the attack surface for organizations is changing, creating more attack vectors that security teams must now defend. The threat created by unmanaged external assets is so significant that Gartner has identified attack surface expansion as one of the top security and risk management trends for organizations to be aware of. However, managing external attack surfaces is becoming difficult for traditional approaches to keep up with. 

Many organizations have embraced digital transformation, remote working, and cloud adoption to increase their growth. As a result, these security workloads are unlikely to decline any time soon. Instead, security teams must explore new methods for maintaining their organization’s defenses.

CISOs’ decision: Hiring an in-house team vs. outsourcing cybersecurity

The Nuspire Annual Study on top CISO buying trends of 2022 reveals that CISOs prioritize their spending based on where they get the most value. A large portion of their limited dollars is put toward staying up-to-date and optimizing existing technology through outsourcing their cybersecurity operations. Some of the cybersecurity functions that are most commonly being outsourced include vulnerability management, insider threat detection, and access management.

Outsourcing your security will unlock the following benefits:

• A solution to the worker shortage: Outsourcing offers an alternative to traditional hiring of security professionals while still getting access to a wide range of expertise from security professionals that are in short supply.
• Focus the efforts on your core business: By outsourcing, your business can free up internal resources to have more time to focus on business activities.
• Round-the-clock protection: External providers can help your organizations secure your systems even outside traditional work hours, which often requires substantial capital expenditure to achieve internally. 

While outsourcing is an appealing solution that can offload internal security teams, it simply pushes the problems to other organizations and does not solve the root problem: security workloads are continuing to grow. Outsourcing activities like attack surface discovery will remain a time-consuming task and, depending on your service agreement, could be expensive. Thus, outsourcing may be a part of the solution, but it is not the complete solution.

Automate your defenses

Whether to outsource or not, organizations need to leverage automation tools to reduce risks and increase operational efficiency. That’s why the US government’s cyber defense agency has recommended that private companies adopt automated threat testing. By automating continuous asset discovery, businesses can remove blind spots and discover vulnerable assets.

Automation provides another key benefit – real-time discovery. This is especially important as threat actors start scanning the internet within 15 minutes of a CVE announcement. The key to combat this is utilizing automated solutions that identify and prioritize emerging risks which pose real threats to your organization.

Security teams have an abundance of data, but most of it lacks the context necessary to improve remediation outcomes. As such, organizations need to move the focus from analytics to actionable insights that can be quickly and efficiently implemented. Automation is one way companies can offload internal teams without outsourcing time-consuming and costly tasks.

Double the defenses with automation and outsourcing 

CISOs and information technology decision-makers cannot keep up with the number of threats that they must investigate and protect their systems against. Instead, they are seeking ways to solidify cyber defenses by outsourcing portions of their responsibilities that help better manage their organization's cybersecurity. In tandem, automated solutions are strongly recommended to reduce the slow manual work that is currently being performed.

Hadrian’s Orchestrator AI behaves like a real-world threat actor and provides 24x7x365 insight into external-facing risks, a capability that would require multiple teams of security analysts to replicate. By mimicking the mindset of a real-life threat actor, Hadrian contextualizes and prioritizes your threats, so your teams can focus only on manual remediation of the vulnerabilities that present real threats to your business. Get in touch with our experts today to get access to one of the best AI-based automation platforms.