As the end of the financial year approaches, it’s a time of introspection for CTOs and CSOs poring over budgets for the year ahead.
Many will be reckoning with high third-party outsourcing costs attached to IT and security. This is partly explained by the COVID era rush to outsource functions to Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs). That made sense at the time against the backdrop of increased threat activity and rapid changes to how enterprises were using IT. But in an economic climate dominated by the need to do more with less, many IT leaders are looking into how they can wrestle back control and reduce their costs.
And the best way to do this is through automating security processes.
Reduce your reliance on outsourcing
Businesses are facing a massive cybersecurity skills gap, which has contributed to a monumental increase in spending on outsourced security services. Cisco recently estimated that the global managed IT services industry grew over 10% in 2023 to reach a total value of $472 billion, surpassing an estimated 3.5% growth in overall IT spending. Third-party support doesn’t come cheap amid a worldwide cyber skills shortage.
A mindset shift is needed amongst IT and security leaders to understand that scaling their security capabilities doesn’t necessarily mean increasing the size of their team with external support. Instead, they can efficiently scale the capabilities of existing solutions with intelligent automation to eliminate many of the manual security processes being outsourced.
Reduce the workload of your security team
Monotonous and repeatable tasks – like IP scoring, URL lookups, and alert monitoring – can all be automated and taken off the plate of their team of security teams. This frees up their time to tackle more complex challenges, which more expensive third-party consultants might otherwise have been brought on to support with.
Reduce your spending on point solutions
The speed at which the cyber landscape is evolving has trapped many organisations in a ‘new threat, new tool’ cycle. This has, in turn, saddled them with a complex security tech stack where overlapping capabilities result in wasted spending.
Instead, interoperable workflows help IT leaders get the most out of the existing stack. Rich integrations with third-party apps and solutions enable more sophisticated automation use cases, such as incident response, attack surface detection, password audits and more.
No maturity barrier to powerful automation
Some security teams mistakenly believe they need to stick with manual processes, and outsourced support to manage them, due to a perceived “unreadiness” to automate. However, maturity needn’t be a barrier to security automation.
The A-Ops platform offers an intuitive, logic-based user interface that doesn’t require advanced development capabilities to use and easily integrates with existing applications and services across IT and OT environments.
And for those that do want additional support getting set up or in managing more critical use cases, there’s SecureAck’s Managed Automation-as-a-Service. MAaaS sets organisations up with automated workflows that create efficiencies and actively reduce their security team’s workload, as well as their dependencies on third-party consultants – whereas working with MSSPs cements these dependencies.
As the new financial year beckons, the only solution for organisations looking to optimise their security estates and reduce their reliance on costly outsourcing contracts is intelligent automation.
