Augment SecOps Skill Shortages with External Security Operations Support

December 20, 2024

Modern security operations support many functions, including cloud security, compliance, threat intelligence and incident response. Managing all these functions is both challenging and expensive.

 

Security operations (SecOps) skill shortages can leave in-house teams ill-equipped to handle advanced threats, which can put their sensitive data, brand and reputation at risk, including negative financial impacts. Instead, consider filling SecOps gaps with external cybersecurity support services to improve defenses.

 

Here are five benefits of hiring an external cybersecurity support service to augment internal SecOps skill shortages.

 

  1. Access On-Demand Expertise without Management Overhead

    2. Hiring external security operations support puts your focus on high-value activities instead of wasting time hiring and managing the right cybersecurity talent.

     

    Cybersecurity skills are in high demand. Attracting qualified experts with the right skills is highly time-consuming and costly.

     

    An external security operations service provider manages talent for all their clients and removes worries about shortlisting talent, negotiating salary packages or charting a growth path for them. Get on-demand expertise, as and when required, for a fraction of the cost.

     

  2. Gain a Unified View of All SecOps Tools

    3. As threats have evolved in complexity, SecOps teams have adopted more tools. As a result, making sense of threat notifications coming in from all the different tools is becoming more challenging. A trusted security operations support provider can help correlate signals across your various SecOps tools, offering a unified and holistic view.

     

    For instance, it is common for a business to have a firewall and network detection and response (NDR) for network protection as well as endpoint detection and response (EDR) to protect endpoints and some level of cloud application security. Each of these security layers is independently capable of detecting threats. However, collectively, they cannot detect a complex, coordinated, multi-pronged attack.

     

    The right security support services partner will help avoid oversights by correlating signals across all the cybersecurity tools to give companies a unified and holistic SecOps view.

     

  3. Get Unbiased Assessments of Your Current Capabilities

    4. Businesses need to assess their SecOps capabilities periodically. A trusted cybersecurity support services provider will help identify potential weaknesses that may lead to security incidents.

     

    Outdated practices or gaps in SecOps can pave the way for an attack. Therefore, it is important to assess triage, monitoring, incident detection and incident response management processes. A thorough security capability assessment will reveal risks, threats and improvement opportunities.

     

  4. Enhance Overall Security Posture

    5. By integrating external support services, businesses can leverage external expertise, advanced tools and additional resources for the same budget. Thus, SecOps effectiveness and threat detection and response capabilities will be enhanced.

     

    SecOps teams risk succumbing to rigid processes such as prioritizing alerts, sandboxing threats, performing malware analysis and troubleshooting security vulnerabilities. Still, they often lack expertise in the critical areas of threat detection and response.

     

    The right security services partner will help remediate infrastructure by identifying vulnerabilities in networks and systems. They will also help formulate recovery plans and create backups that can be used to recover quickly after an attack. By augmenting SecOps teams with external expertise, address SecOps skill shortages while enhancing overall security posture.

     

  5. Ensure Round-the-Clock Security Operations

    6. Bad actors work around the clock by collaborating with hackers across time zones. Managed security services (MSS) will improve security operations 24/7 throughout the year.

     

    Say that a business in the EST timezone gets attacked by bad actors working in an Asian timezone. In this scenario, the bad actors have at least eight hours before their counterparts access their security operations dashboard. During weekends or holidays, attacks can sometimes go undetected for more than 48 hours.

     

    Investing in an internal 24/7/365 SecOps team is only worthwhile if cybersecurity is a core part of business offerings. A better option for most businesses is to employ a managed security service that leverages the latest technologies, schedules strategic maintenance downtime, updates security controls periodically and allocates the optimal resources for each function.

 

 

Choose a Trusted Cybersecurity Services Partner

Before entrusting security operations to an external partner, consider their track record, expertise and the industries they serve.

 

Optiv is the world’s most trusted cybersecurity services provider because it has a stellar track record of serving manufacturing, retail, automotive, infrastructure, healthcare, financial services and technology companies, and nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500 trust Optiv with their cybersecurity operations.

 

Partner with Optiv today to discuss how to augment SecOps skill shortages.

Eric Osmus
By:
Eric Osmus
Manager of Detection & Response SOAR Engineering | Optiv
Eric Osmus is the Manager of Detection & Response SOAR Engineering within Optiv's Managed Services. Eric leads a team responsible for providing expert SOAR solutions for Optiv MDR. Eric has over a decade of experience in security operations - including incident response, vulnerability management, and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR).

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