With cyber threats evolving faster than ever, cybersecurity has become an essential part for each business plan and budget. However, CISOs are facing several challenges when it comes to security.
At one side, the cybersecurity industry’s global talent shortage is ongoing making it hard for organisations to build or expand in house teams. On the other side, there’s a surge in cybersecurity companies that offer a wide range of security solutions with varied quality. This makes it difficult for CISOs to choose the right partner(s).
That leads to the difficult question, whether or not to outsource cybersecurity in part or full. In this blog we discuss why outsourcing on its own is not the silver bullet, and how automation comes into play.
In 2023, we’ve recorded a surge in ransomware and phishing attacks and DDoS AI-driven automated attacks. Hence it’s no wonder that cybersecurity professionals feel the pressure on their shoulders, but also their work/life balance. Adding these challenges to an increase in security professionals quitting their roles and the talent shortage, you can imagine the pressures that IT security teams face.
For midsize and smaller businesses and organisations, the staffing issue is exacerbated by the global cybersecurity talent shortage. The shortage leads to higher wage demands, and potentially additional requirements around the working environment from cybersecurity professionals. This gives large corporations the advantage over small and midsize companies for hiring cybersecurity talent, offering them higher salaries and better perks.
This leaves small and midsize companies with understaffed IT security teams which often lacks in-depth expertise of cybersecurity and cyber threats. These teams are relied on for all IT security, including patching and fixing vulnerabilities across the entire infrastructure, but also managing awareness training programs.
To deal with the rapid evolution of cyber threats, new vulnerabilities and in an attempt to reduce the workload, organisations tend to implement tech. In their pursuit for tech, multiple solutions and vendors are selected and onboarded without considering overlap or if the solution is really the right one for the organisation.
Bringing onboard tech to deal with IT security creates another problem. The number of alerts of vulnerabilities and weaknesses can be overwhelming in the early days. Your IT Security team will have to follow up on all the alerts, determine whether or not found vulnerabilities are true vulnerabilities or false positives. Valuable time is taken up by this process, where false positives are filtered out, and once the findings are verified, the fixes need to be implemented.
The Nuspire Annual Study on top CISO buying trends of 2022 reveals that CISOs prioritise spending based on where they’ll get the best value. A large portion of their limited budget is invested in staying up-to-date and optimising existing technology through outsourcing cybersecurity operations. Most common outsourced cybersecurity solutions include vulnerability scanning, threat detection and access management.
Solves your staff shortage: You’ll have access to expertise from security professionals without having to hiring and retaining them within your team
Focus on core business: Through outsourcing, you can focus your internal resources to activities that are core to the business
24/7 protection: With external parties you can achieve 24/7 security for a fraction of the cost to achieve this with internal resources.
However appealing outsourcing seems, it does not address the root cause: workloads for IT security teams continue to grow. Take the example we mentioned before. Outsourcing vulnerability scanning saves time in searching and finding vulnerabilities with your internal resources. However, your team will still have to deal with every reported vulnerability, including many false positives, which is time consuming. Therefore outsourcing is a part of the solution, but it isn’t the full solution.
Whether you’re outsourcing or not, you need to leverage the power of automated security tools to reduce risks and increase your operational efficiency. That’s why the US government’s cyber defence agency has recommended that private businesses adopt automated threat testing. By automating continuous asset discovery, businesses can remove blind spots and discover vulnerable assets. Each of those vulnerabilities can form the attack vector and entry point for hackers.
Automation also brings the benefit of realtime discovery. This is essential, given that threat actors start scanning for vulnerabilities across the internet within 15 minutes of a CVE announcement. Hence the importance of automation to identify and prioritise risks which pose real threats to your business.
IT Security teams have an abundance of data, which with automation can be supplemented with contextual information to improve and speed up remediation. Not every automated solution will provide this, and would still leave your team with lots of manual work to do. The right automated threat scanning solutions will provide the required contextual information to aid fast remediation.
CISOs and IT decision makers cannot keep up with the increasing number of threats they must investigate and protect their business from. Instead, they need to enhance and solidify cyber defences by outsourcing parts of their cybersecurity. Together with outsourcing, CISOs must implement automated solutions to increase their team’s efficiency.
Hackurity's Atrax fits that requirement perfectly. It replicates a real cyberattack on your business with an industry’s leading technology. Fully automated and on daily basis, Atrax maps vulnerabilities across your entire attack surface (web apps, end user devices, APIs, servers, domains, IT Supply chain, and more). When it finds vulnerabilities, it will exploit them with payload-less attacks. Only when successfully exploited, it will report the full details of the vulnerability with contextual information and suggested fix.
By replicating a real cyberattack, Atrax takes the mindset of a hacker and thus will target your business from every angle. This mindset creates a holistic overview of your security posture in realtime, 24/7/365. It also creates the context to every vulnerability report, saving your team valuable time to remediate the risk. Especially with the hands-on support from Hackurity's experts with remediation.
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Hackurity is redesigning cybersecurity through its unique and innovative concept of push button pentesting. By fully automating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities, Hackurity is the extra pair of hands for your IT team. Our auto reporting contextualises risks in a single dashboard, making remediation more efficient.
Developed by enterprise pentesters, Hackurity provides 24/7 security, focused on prevention. Headquartered in The Netherlands, hackurity.io offers its world class cybersecurity solutions to businesses around the world.
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