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Cybersecurity Needs May Require an Innovative Approach: Outsourcing

The demand is incredibly high. The talent pool is troublingly small. Hiring cybersecurity specialists is not for the faint of heart.

For government organizations, developing in-house resources is challenging without the bonus structure, culture and perks of private industry to lure top candidates. A near-term solution is to team up with those private industry partners who already have the talent resources while developing expertise within as a longer goal.

Here’s when to outsource for cybersecurity:

Large and small organizations can successfully outsource their IT security. For a primer on how to make it work, they need only to look to the business world. Many of the largest, multi-national companies have outsourced some or all of their IT security processes to third parties. They know that the specialized and high-level knowledge, and innovative solutions, needed to respond to a rapidly evolving threat landscape don’t have to be built from scratch.

Does outsourcing make sense for your organization? Consider:

Outsourcing may seem like a better solution than developing internal resources. But if applied long-term, outsourcing will fail to solve the root problem: the sector needs to have cyber expertise itself. Therefore, the solution requires a hybrid approach that combines heavy outsourcing and hiring now, and a transition to either dedicated internal resources or shared federal resources over time.

The public sector has made huge headway in the last decade in terms of hiring IT and cybersecurity professionals to provide strong leadership. However, organizations wanting to hire their own staff to implement policies and controls are faced with the same roadblock as the private sector—a lack of skilled applicants. As we wait for upskilling to backfill the need, outsourced support  serves as an effective blueprint for future plans.

Edward Tuorinsky, Managing Principal at DTS, a government consultant business, is a service-disabled veteran who brings nearly two decades of experience to DTS in the areas of leadership, management consulting and information technology services.

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

This post originally appeared on January 14, 2021.

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