The skills gap in IT (and cyber security, specifically) is a legitimate crisis. One that extends beyond the limited resources of small businesses to heavily impact midmarket and enterprise organizations, as well.

While there are more college graduates with technical degrees than ever, HR leaders, CIOs, and CEOs can all agree that hiring to solve IT and cybersecurity challenges is problematic.

In fact, research from CompTIA shows that 57% of enterprises believe the IT skills gap will continue to grow. This sentiment extends to cybersecurity, as ESG research shows that 51% of organizations struggle to find candidates with the skills to defend against modern threats.

For many midmarket and enterprise leaders, addressing the skills crisis means spending time and money to optimize hiring, training, and employee retention.

However, there’s another option that doesn’t expend your finite resources—the managed services path.

Where In-House IT Can Fall Short

In the age of digital transformation, IT leaders face an uphill battle to “do more with less” and shift from business supporter to true business partner.

This sentiment typically applies to the need for IT to lead innovative projects that keep up with new technologies. Because of the skills gap, your IT team might spend more time keeping the lights on than driving innovative projects forward.

Masking the skills gap isn’t as simple when it comes to tasks that protect your business—cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery. If you can’t overcome the skills gap, your in-house IT team can fall short in these respects and negatively impact your bottom line.

• Backup and Disaster Recovery Challenges: Studies show that 60% of companies that experience data loss shut down six months after the disaster incident. All it takes is one cyber attack or storm to create outages across your organization. And even if you have aggressive RPO and RTO goals, having an internal IT team that’s stretched thin can cause problems with recovery. For midmarket and enterprise organizations relying on connected, mission-critical systems, cutting corners in terms of backup and data replication can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue.
• Cybersecurity Challenges: Ransomware, call center scams, payment/banking fraud, malware and other threats put pressure on cybersecurity systems to keep your network safe. Attackers grow more sophisticated every day and find new and more innovative ways to bypass advanced security solutions. Even if you’ve invested the money to deploy high-end security systems, sub-par detection and response processes can lead to significant data loss.

The rate of change in cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery technologies has exhausted the resources of internal IT teams. While global IT spending is expected to grow 3.2% in 2019, you won’t want to expend any budget increases on tasks meant to keep the lights on—even if they’re essential to the long-term success of your organization.

Shifting cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery to a managed service provider gives you a path to meet industry-leading standards and overcome the IT skills gap—without expending the money or time you would with an internal team.

3 Key Components of a Managed Services Provider Relationship

When midmarket and enterprise organizations discuss IT managed services, cost efficiency is usually the most prominent part of the conversation. And while that’s invaluable in the current state of IT, the real value is the level of service and operational expertise you gain.

Rather than perfecting the hiring, training, and retention processes needed to combat the IT skills gap, a managed service provider offers access to:

1. Comprehensive Strategic Planning: Disaster recovery and cybersecurity aren’t just technology challenges. The operational approach to getting the most out of that technology plays an equally important role. When an in-house IT team can’t devote enough time and budget to these processes, your technology investments won’t deliver the ROI you expect. Managed service providers give you the benefits of expert security and disaster recovery programs.
2. Focused, Always-On Security Services: Rather than having security monitoring be one piece of a team’s job, managed service providers give you 24/7/365 monitoring with best-in-class tools. Everything from firewalls to intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning, antivirus, VPN deployments, and any other necessary network security tools become defenses for your own organization.
3. Advanced Detection and Response Framework: Our partnership with AlienVault helps midmarket and enterprise organizations a holistic security-as-a-service framework. With these services, you’ll be able to pass any necessary compliance audits and save resources with comprehensive threat data delivered to IT leaders. This data enables in-house IT teams to target projects and processes more effectively and spend more time aligning with business initiatives than on menial tasks.

Offloading cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery to a leading managed services provider gives you peace of mind when it comes to data protection and system uptime. Not to mention the cost savings compared to implementing (and maintaining) industry-leading solutions and services internally.

The real challenge is finding a managed services provider that you can trust. One that will act as a true partner to deliver the best possible cybersecurity and disaster recovery.

We’d love to help you implement the cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery solutions your business needs to survive. Contact us today and learn how we can make a difference for your organization.