6. To what extent can outsourcing and managed services address the shortage of regional cybersecurity talent and expertise? What is CrowdStrike doing to help organizations cope with this shortfall?
SEN: The survey reveals that the shortage of resources and expertise remains a major concern, with 61% of regional respondents’ organizations finding it more difficult to hire cybersecurity professionals this year, as compared to last year.
This is against the backdrop of inhouse cybersecurity teams having reduced in size, with half of regional respondents’ organizations having 5 to 20% of their cybersecurity team leave the business in the past year.
While various initiatives like the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA)’s SG Cyber Educators programme to groom the next generation of talent in the field are well underway, the industry is not likely to realize the benefits immediately because it will be several years before new cybersecurity graduates have the knowledge and experience required to be well-versed security experts. This reinforces the view of 39% of survey respondents in the APAC region, who said that the greatest challenge is that there is currently not enough cybersecurity talent available in the market.
Security alert fatigue, which also affects daily security operations, is aggravated by the talent gap and may be worth mentioning because failing to address alerts in a timely manner can have disastrous consequences.
When there are not enough resources to handle all alerts – which can easily total hundreds to thousands in a day – choices must be made about which detections to investigate and which can be ignored. This means it could take longer for a security analyst in a lean team to get to a critical alert, resulting in an uninvestigated detection leading to a major compromise, which was the case in the infamous Target breach.
Organizations may then try to cope with the lack of talent by cutting down on processes. They might blindly re-image compromised systems, instead of investigating incidents in-depth to remediate them. This might be a quick and easy fix for the security team, but this approach can be very disruptive for the business, causing long periods of employee downtime.
A logical conclusion therefore seems to be that until enough experienced security professionals are available to meet the growing demand for cybersecurity expertise, organizations will have to turn to other options to respond to the talent shortage issue.
At a strategic level, organizations are trying to solve the problem by outsourcing their needs and turning to MSSPs (Managed Security Services Providers) or MDR (Managed Detection and Response) to absorb part of the workload. At an operational level, automation and orchestration are being considered to streamline and scale security teams, so they can meet the increased security requirements.
The growing availability of these options are again reinforced by survey respondents in the APAC region, with 42% agreeing that outsourcing has become easier than directly hiring.
CrowdStrike provides one of such options with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, a managed security service specifically designed to close the security skills gap. Falcon Complete provides advanced protection technology and a dedicated team of security professionals focused on managing and monitoring an organization’s endpoint security and responding to threats.
By off-loading the burden of endpoint security to CrowdStrike, organizations can reach the required maturity for their endpoint security strategy without having to spend countless months hiring, training, implementing and managing a comprehensive endpoint security program. This option provides the people and technology needed to handle all aspects of endpoint security, as well as organizations the peace of mind from knowing that security experts are watching its endpoints 24 hours a day and will take immediate action to remediate incidents whenever needed.
