The boardroom case for cyber security as a managed service

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The boardroom case for cyber security as a managed service

Cyber attacks on British businesses are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated – that’s a dangerous combination. Although an attack remains statistically unlikely, the chances are increasing almost daily.

Despite these trends, too many firms are still adopting passive, reactive policies, only reacting after an attack has happened. The question to ask yourself and your board of directors is whether you would be happy to leave the contents of your home uninsured, and only react if you had a burglary.

Think of your cyber security strategy as an insurance policy. While the best tools used to be affordable only to large enterprises, they are now much more accessible to SMEs. Given this, the challenge becomes how to bring it onto your management team’s agenda.

IT needs to be an innovator

As a highly digital economy, it is vital to be at the top of your game in the UK market. Whether your customers are B2B or B2C, evolving customer demands, operational efficiency, and the need to differentiate your products or services means IT needs to be at the centre of everything you do.

To do so, the limited IT resources you have cannot be consumed by tactical activities such as cyber security defences. Bailing water out of a leaking boat is a guaranteed way to ensure you never have the time or focus to drive new digital products or experiences for your customers.

By outsourcing “keeping the lights on” IT tasks such as cyber security, internal IT teams can be put to much more strategic use to innovate, create and develop. In the digital age, the reality is that every business initiative is an IT initiative – or at the very least needs involvement from IT.

Communicate the cost of an incident

Although the most common link is with paying a ransom demand, there are many ancillary costs associated to a cyber security incident – so much so that the response to the incident often proves much more expensive than preventing them in the first place.

And that assessment does not factor in the great intangible of reputational damage - the loss of public trust. In short, if your customers lose trust in you, they will leave.

Not only that, but it is estimated that only 35% of SMBs could remain profitable for more than three months without access to vital data.

To compound the issue, there is a recognised cyber security skills shortage in the UK. This makes it difficult to hire in specialist cyber security professionals, and as a result it can mean IT generalists without specific cyber skills trying to plug the gap.

Protecting the core of your business

More than 90% of successful hacks and data breaches start with phishing scams. By focusing on this threat and eliminating it, you can significantly reduce the cyber security risk factor.

By adopting cyber security as a managed service, you can focus on what matters to your without worrying about managing the burden of day-to-day IT infrastructure. With NetUtils managed services, you gain access to their highly trained, certified and experienced technical team who will manage, review and maintain your critical infrastructure so you don’t have to.

Managed cyber security versus in-house

Four ways managed cyber security services trump in-house recruitment:

Remove the pain and cost of recruitment: The cyber security skills shortage in the UK makes it difficult and expensive to recruit in-house
Short term-ism: The average tenure of senior security leaders is less than 3 years
Fills knowledge gaps: Only 6% of companies have a CISO on the board of directors, with the result being a lack of focus on security strategy
Lack of skills: The number of technologies needed in a comprehensive security strategy make it hard to acquire those skills in-house