Cisco Sees Increased Reliance on Cybersecurity Outsourcing

A new report on the state of cybersecurity published today by Cisco finds that the increased sophistication of the attacks being launched by cybercriminals is pushing more organizations to rely on outsourcing to combat these threats.

Usage of monitoring provided as service (49%) is up five percent year over year, while reliance on service providers for incident response (47%) is up two percent. Employment of security consulting services (54%) is up three percent.

The survey consists of 3,600 chief security officers (CSOs) and security operations (SecOps) managers from 26 countries. The report makes it clear that internal IT organizations are increasingly outmatched as the level of sophistication of IT attacks being launched continues to increase, says Steve Benvenuto, senior director of global security partner sales for the Cisco Global Security Sales Organization.

The Cisco report finds the volume of instances where cybercriminals are employing encryption to hide malware has increased over 50 percent. In total, Cisco says it has discovered a threefold increase in encrypted network communication in malware samples inspected over a 12-month period.

As those attacks continue to increase Benvenuto says a chronic shortage of cybersecurity professionals will force more organizations to rely on the external expertise of service providers.

“Reports suggest there’s a global shortage of as many as two million cybersecurity professionals,” says Benvenuto.

The issue that many organizations have today is that IT projects can’t go forward unless cybersecurity issues are addressed. Rather than viewing cybersecurity as an afterthought, organizations are now viewing a basic level of cybersecurity to be included as table stakes in any new project, notes Benvenuto.

Addressing those requirements has only become more challenging as workloads get distributed across hybrid cloud environments, adds Benvenuto.

Of course, the challenge solution providers face is the same as an internal IT organization. There simply isn’t enough talent to go around. Because of that issue, Benvenuto says Cisco is seeing more partnering between solution providers. In fact, Benevuto says there’s been an increase in the number of security specialists that primarily sell their services via other partners in the channel versus building their own sales organizations.

At the same time, the Cisco report also makes it clear there is an increased reliance on automation and artificial intelligence to plug the cybersecurity skills gap. The question no one knows the answer to yet is to what degree those technologies might eventually address cybersecurity issues to the point where demand for external cybersecurity expertise starts to fall.