Employee productivity and morale is important to the performance of your IT department. But with the increasing complexity of IT environments, and the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures, IT staff can feel overwhelmed. New research from Forrester suggests that organizations can improve the productivity and job satisfaction of their IT teams by outsourcing some applications and services, such as IT security, to cloud services providers.
The report, Empower Your IT Teams with Security as a Service Offerings, sponsored by TierPoint and Microsoft, surveyed organizations with multi-cloud environments about their use of Security as a service. The report found that employee productivity, the top-ranked benefit, improved for 38% of respondents, while job satisfaction increased in 27% and IT management costs decreased for 26%.
Security as a Service is the practice of outsourcing IT security responsibilities to a third-party security provider, so businesses can focus their IT security staff on more strategic projects or initiatives.
Benefits of Security as a Service
Outsourcing to a security as a service provider frees IT professionals from the daily chores of maintaining and monitoring IT security systems. That, in turn, allows them to focus on more interesting, higher-value projects that contribute directly to the business.
Another way that security as a service can benefit a company is by lowering payroll costs. The competition for cloud and cyber-security professionals today is fierce. In fact, the top three IT skills in current demand are cybersecurity, cloud security and cloud computing, according to Robert Half Technology’s State of U.S. Tech Hiring report.
Also read: Cybersecurity Pros Need Both Technical and Business Know-How
The competition for a limited number of IT professionals drives up salaries. Glassdoor, a national job recruitment site, reports salaries for cloud security engineers average $130,000, with the most experienced ones earning $150,000 and up. Combined with benefits and other overhead, that makes maintaining a fully-staffed, in-house cloud security department an expensive proposition.
These specialists are necessary because security for a multi-cloud or hybrid environment is complex. It requires integrating both on-premises and cloud applications with a company’s identity and access management system as well as with other on-premises or cloud applications that must interact with each other. It also requires an understanding of compliance with government and industry security regulations, the ability to identify and evaluate dozens of daily security events and respond appropriately, as well as a host of other duties – some of which could prove challenging to smaller IT departments.
Find the right Security as a Service provider
Security as a service and managed security services providers (MSSPs), such as TierPoint, not only implement and manage IT security solutions for their clients but they also provide access to experienced security specialists in areas such as firewall management, DDoS mitigation, vulnerability scanning and compliance services. That relieves the IT manager from having to recruit new talent and gives small- and mid-sized companies access to expertise they couldn’t normally afford.
Other, related benefits of security as a service include:
- improved security protection (36%)
- improved end-user experience (32%)
- reduced downtime (30%)
- faster incident response (26%)
Using a cloud security services provider gives IT departments access to experienced security experts and cloud security best practices, as well as the most advanced security tools. The bottom line is that security as a service and managed cloud security services improve the overall quality of an organization’s IT security, reduce costs associated with on-premises security solutions and provide IT managers with a happier, more productive IT staff.
Want to learn more about managed security services?
To learn more about security as a service, read Empower Your IT Teams with Security as a Service Offerings.
