Date: 23 January 2024
With the consistent rise in cyber crime across countries and industries, cybersecurity has become a prime concern for businesses across the globe. It’s no longer just an IT problem but a business problem.
Yet, many businesses find it difficult to manage their cyber security posture internally. And that’s why several organisations outsource cybersecurity to the experts. In this blog, we show you how our cyber security consultancy services helped our clients achieve greater cyber resilience and better cybersecurity maturity in 2023.
The top goals that our clients achieved through our cybersecurity consultancy in 2023 include:
- Evaluation of Current Breach Readiness
- Fit-for-purpose Incident Response Plans and Playbooks
- Testing their cybersecurity plans and policies
- Improved supply chain security
- Achieving Compliance with standards and regulations
But before we delve into how our clients leveraged our services, let’s take a look at the chief reasons to outsource cybersecurity as we enter into 2024.
Top Reasons to Outsource Cybersecurity in 2024
- Cybersecurity Talent Shortage
It’s pretty well-known that the cybersecurity industry faces a massive talent crunch today. It can be difficult to find enough experienced talent to build a sufficient internal cybersecurity team. Even if you do end up finding the right resources, they may be extremely expensive. The talent crunch makes hiring internal personnel a very costly affair.
- Cost-effectiveness
Building an internal team can often be hard and expensive as discussed above. Additionally, many organisations have security requirements that don’t necessarily mandate hiring full-time staff. Outsourcing cybersecurity can be a great value proposition today. Outsourcing allows you to access top-tier cybersecurity services without the overhead costs associated with hiring full-time employees. These can include costs such as salaries, benefits, training, and the acquisition of necessary tools and technologies.
- Highly experienced practitioners:
Cybersecurity is a complex and rapidly evolving field. Outsourcing to specialists ensures that your cybersecurity needs are managed by experts such as ours. They are up-to-date with the latest threats, technologies, and best practices. Moreover, they have helped hundreds of organisations worldwide to improve their cyber resilience posture. This nuanced global experience is unmatched and critical in helping you build cyber resilience for the current threat landscape.
- Scalability and flexibility:
Cybersecurity needs can fluctuate based on various factors, such as your company’s growth, changes in the threat landscape, or regulatory requirements.
Outsourced information security consulting services can be scaled up or down based on your business's current needs, providing flexibility and keeping costs minimal. In fact, our Virtual Cyber Assistant and Virtual Cyber Consultant services are one of the most flexible options you’ll ever find for your cybersecurity needs. There are 4 different service tiers which you can choose from depending on your requirement along with flexible payment plans. The services also offer readymade packages and access to 300+ cybersecurity services across 15 different domains.
Now let’s look at the ways in which real businesses leveraged our top-tier cyber consulting services in 2023.
How Clients Leveraged our Cyber Security Outsourcing Services in 2023?
#1. Evaluation of Current Breach Readiness
The first step in boosting your cybersecurity maturity is assessing where you stand in the present. Our Virtual Cyber Assistant and Virtual Cyber Consultant services helped many clients evaluate their existing cyber posture.
All clients got access to a one-time NIST-based Health Check upon onboarding. Apart from this, our consultants helped them identify what kind of checks and audits they needed to get started. From Ransomware Assessments to Risk Assessments, our consultants have helped businesses across the globe understand how to truly gauge their current cybersecurity health and prioritise risks.
#2. Fit-for-purpose Incident Response Plans and Playbooks
Some of the most critical aspects of cybersecurity resilience include the Cyber Incident Response plans, policies and procedures you have in place. However, often we find that businesses either don’t have sufficient cybersecurity plans and/or incident response playbooks or the ones they have aren’t fit-for-purpose. They need reviewing and refreshing in order to make them relevant to the ever-evolving threat landscape.
Our Virtual Cyber Assistant and Virtual Cyber Consultant services helped several of our clients update their cybersecurity policy and documentation in keeping with the current cyber crime climate.
Clients typically have to choose from 3 Actions - Create New, Review and Comment, Review and Refresh for over 300 services across 15 cybersecurity domains. Depending on the option chosen, our expert consultants either created new documents for them or shared their opinion on how to refresh their existing documents.
#3. Testing cybersecurity plans and policies
While it’s great to have perfectly robust cyber incident response plans and incident response playbooks, without testing them for efficiency they are pretty pointless. Cyber Attack Tabletop Exercises act as a litmus test for your cyber attack preparedness. They show you how useful your documentation will be in an actual crisis and how well your team is versed with them. They also help your team practise decision-making during the simulated cyber attack tabletop scenario.
Our specialist consultants have helped hundreds of organisations plan, product and host a successful cyber tabletop exercise. Many of our clients used their services to plan the exercise, curate a highly relevant scenario and execute the incident response simulation drill effectively. The outcome was that the gaps in organisational cybersecurity became apparent and the experts shared recommendations with them on how to improve their overall cyber resilience.
Read our blog to know about the Top Cyber Attack Tabletop Scenarios our clients rehearsed in 2023.
Our top Cyber Tabletop facilitators have also created a host of extremely useful resources which have helped our clients with the right tools to plan, produce and host their own cyber drills:
- Top Cyber Tabletop Exercise Scenarios to Rehearse
- Cyber Tabletop Exercise Template
- Cyber Attack Tabletop Exercise PPT
#4. Improved Supply Chain Security
Supply Chain Attacks just don’t stop making news anymore. The SolarWinds attack was one of the biggest in recent years and it was quickly followed by the MOVEit and Okta attacks that are still making news into 2024. It is critical that global businesses invest in improving their supply chain security and that’s what we helped many clients do last year.
Clients either chose the end-to-end supply chain management package or opted for us to review their supply chain processes. We helped many of them create, review and evaluate their organisational cybersecurity controls for their supply chain management processes. One of the primary tasks pertaining to supply chain security that clients had for us was to fill up supplier questionnaires for them.
Our consultants took time to understand their supplier involvement, the kind of data shared with suppliers, IT controls implemented etc. We then reviewed their agreements, data sharing practices, cyber security controls, etc. and identified appropriate cyber controls to ensure better supply chain security management.
#5. Achieving Compliance with standards and regulations
Our Virtual Cyber Consultancy services offer curated packages which helped many clients achieve their compliance objectives in 2023. Packages include Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001:2022, NIST's Cybersecurity Framework and Business Continuity.
Many of our clients became ISO certified last year, for instance, with our ISO 27001 Readiness Package. Our consultants supported them in creating and adapting to the cybersecurity framework based on ISO 27001. They evaluated their current posture, provided recommendations for improvement, created relevant policies and processes. They also helped them to develop a risk assessment methodology and assisted them in conducting a Risk assessment.
This is just an example of how some clients got the most out of our readymade packages. While many chose these packages to meet a standard or certification, the important thing to note is how dramatically this improved their overall defences against cyber crime.
