9 Reasons To Outsource Security Operations

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9 Reasons To Outsource Security Operations

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Simplify and strengthen your security operations by outsourcing to a managed security operations centre. This blog explores how leveraging dedicated expertise and advanced tools can protect your business efficiently and affordably.

Full visibility of your technology estate is essential. And while SIEM (security information and event management) solutions afford the granularity and functionality required to protect your business, a security operation's overall management and maintenance can weigh heavy in cost and resource. A managed security operations centre offers a viable and affordable option - in time, money, and skills.

If you are considering building a security operations centre from scratch, you should know it can take months or even years to reach full operation and total security. Also, sourcing people to manage it and the tools needed to secure your business can be hugely expensive.

Increasingly sophisticated attacks from fraudsters and cybercriminals demand intelligent detection, interception, and even predictive technologies to identify and prevent. Poorly managed security operations or an inadequately implemented security operations centre (SOC) leave you vulnerable, putting your customers’ data and valuable IP at risk.

Switching to a managed security operation centre built on Microsoft Sentinel and leveraging dedicated expertise can help mitigate those risks and provide additional benefits.

1. Alert Overload

If your SIEM generates too many alerts, especially false positives, you might struggle prioritising real threats. Alert fatigue can lead to genuine risks being overlooked.

Poorly configured rules of overly broad thresholds and a lack of custom detection rules can result in an enormous volume of alerts. These alerts make it impossible to spot the signal in the noise.

Fixing the problem requires a deep understanding of attack patterns and tuning strategies. Machine Learning and AI can help you get some way towards total coverage, but you require expertise in model tuning, too.

What’s worse is that false positives can increase even after reducing alerts. Machine Learning models may incorrectly label and categorise activities meaning decreased precision but improved confidence in predictions.

2. Delayed Detection

A noticeable lag between security incidents and alerts indicates inefficiency in event correlation, possibly due to poorly defined rules or limited processing capacity.

Whether you have resource limitations causing a backlog, complex correlation rules, or data processing bottlenecks, any delays are unacceptable.

Increasing processing capacity is critical in optimising rules and adjusting retention periods for older data. However, if the delay is continuous or the data is incomplete, it might mean that detection rules have been configured incorrectly.

Managed systems eliminate this challenge and offer the added benefit of stripping away additional challenges of scaling and overhauling infrastructure.

3. Inadequate Coverage

If new systems, applications, or devices aren't covered because your SIEM hasn't been implemented correctly, there will be gaps in your coverage. Any gap, no matter how small, is a huge problem.

Running legacy software (or hardware) and new security systems is a double threat to your operation. One leaves you languishing behind more nimble competition, and the other leaves you vulnerable to threats in the cracks that can appear. You must configure your environment correctly and maintain it expertly to stay safe.

An additional complication is the subsequent mismatch and compatibility issues which arise from integrating old technology and new platforms.

You should be evaluating your security solutions regularly and searching for an environment or supplier capable of multi-cloud environments with additional connectors for expanded data source ingestion and coverage.

4. Compliance Gaps

Do you grapple with regulatory or internal compliance standards? These might stem from your SIEM’s inability to execute adequate monitoring or reporting.

Some SIEM systems are more difficult to configure and can leave gaps in your reporting. Implementing compliance-specific rules and conducting regular audits is essential to mitigate the risk but its a time-consuming and complex way to solve what can be a simple problem.

Seek out a SIEMs with built-in compliance reporting, and if cloud-based, that stay ahead of regulatory changes. You can even add compliance management solutions for further protection if you operate in a more highly-regulated industry.

5. Scalability and Integration Problems

Are you experiencing difficulty handling increased data volumes due to company growth or additional data sources? Does it result in slow analysis and report generation? And are you able to correctly connect all the systems and applications you need to manage a sprawling technology estate?

Outsourced technology often affords increased storage and compute capacity. And managed services give you the flexibility to scale up or down to match your requirements while accessing the full functionality of leading security systems.

Working with a managed security and services provider, you can cherry-pick from the leading security tools they offer. For example, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, endpoint detection and response systems, and leveraging auditing and compliance tools for further removal of risk.

While you may be able to integrate many of your existing tools, staying on top of different product roadmaps and versions and shifting APIs is a full-time job. In fact, internal 24/7/365 security operations centres will likely take more than 10 months to build and are only really relevant for large scale organisations with complex internal requirements. Save yourself the unnecessary hassle and technical challenges and focus on delivering business value instead.

6. Leverage Advanced Analytics

Can you readily identify unknown threats? Are you leveraging machine learning or behavioural analytics to help detect and label previously unrecognised attacks? Outdated or poorly implemented systems don’t give you the tools to stay ahead.

Some older SIEM architectures don’t support the application of machine learning capabilities to learn and improve performance rapidly. Even attempting to deploy other tools and integrate them into the system can cause problems, overwhelming it with too much structured or unstructured data.

Look for a SIEM with integrated behavioural analytics so that you can be confident you’re detecting issues before they become a risk. With outsourced solutions, you're adding a management layer on top to access deeper expertise in AI/ML models to improve your analytics performance, that helps you predict and preempt attacks in advance.

7. Poor UI/UX

Are your dashboards or reports cumbersome to navigate or understand? Is it difficult to glean insights from your data quickly? And do you have the capacity to customise what you see and surface the correct information to your expert users?

Newer systems offer superior graphical interfaces, but configuration challenges still exist. They are designed for flexibility and handling multiple use cases; the hardest part is making vast datasets understandable.

When things are configured correctly, training times are dramatically reduced, too. New team members can be ramped up in virtually no time at all, and everyone can play their part in security.

Managed service providers will work with you to design and build dashboards and reports that are just right for you. Whether you want to focus on endpoints or analyse data flows internally, they can curate the perfect environment for you and your requirements.

8. No Automated Response To Threats

SIEMs typically offer automated detection and remediation. No more repetitive manual tasks tackling similar threats; you simply set up playbooks and allow the software to detect and trigger responses automatically.

For example, your outsourced solution on Microsoft Sentinel can automatically block an IP address, reset a user account and quarantine a machine using Sentinel MDR. No human touches this process.

However, expertise is required to assess the accuracy of the programmes and it should not be seen as a silver bullet. Managed service providers are uniquely placed to monitor the performance and continually adapt responses for heightened security.

You should operate within an ecosystem where you can deploy a collection of the best services. As a managed service provider, we specialise in building integrated security solutions for our customers and only work with the best technology.

9. Budget & Resource Misalignment

Do you suffer from high ongoing costs or disproportionate resource demands? Is your current security ecosystem or infrastructure placing a huge burden on your budgets and people?

Many SIEMs leverage outdated licensing models that aren’t aligned to data volume and need more personnel to operate due to their complexity. In either case, the problems will worsen if allowed to persist - whether through poor employee reviews on platforms like Glassdoor or spiralling costs that never come down.

Working with a managed security and services provider gives you a fixed-cost, low-resource-intensive option to get your systems (and budgets) under control.

Time to consider a managed service and SOC?

Remove the security management burden, get more from your tech stack, elevate your protection, and use cutting-edge security tools with dedicated expertise. Our managed SOC offers you all of this and is built on top of Microsoft Sentinel.

Contact us now or watch the Boardroom Under Siege webinar to learn more about the cyber-risks to your business, featuring a real-time hack and a panel of security experts.