√ Hiring Internal IT Staff
√ Threat Management
     Practice
√ Secure Your New PC
√ Presenting with
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√ For Laughs
 

Thinking about hiring your own internal IT staff – think again!
Outsourcing your IT brings additional business value
by Stuart R. Crawford, V.P., IT Matters, Inc.

Businesses today wrestle and grapple with the thought of hiring their own technology support staff to support their daily need for IT support without fully understanding the risks and the costs associated with having their own team of technology professionals.

Business owners, C level execs and Managers are attracted to the idea of having a team or a consultant readily available within shouting distance down the hall, basically having an IT resource committed to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, many of today’s business owners across the country are not aware of the total risks their business is exposed to by electing to bring their technology support in-house.

More often than not it is purely a cost based decision, on the surface it may appear to be more cost effective to hire a consultant or employee who is committed as a full time employee. CFOs and Accounting Managers often look only at the cost of having their IT outsourced and or attracted to hiring someone for a few thousand dollars a month as part of their staff will save their company in the long run. This is not the case in reality and by having a full time employee will actually end up costing business today more in the long run.

So what are the advantages of having an IT Partner who focuses on delivering a complete managed technology solution? There are a number of immediate benefits over having a full time employee. These benefits include...

The Network Security Dilemma
IT executives trying to keep on top of network security face a difficult task: the growing sophistication of the threats, an increasing compliance burden, and the vulnerabilities exposed by new applications and technologies.

Hackers are no longer focused on notoriety as on financial gain—in fact, organized crime is becoming an ever-larger part of the network security struggle. Combined with the widespread availability of exploit development frameworks, the addition of the profit motive means that threats arise and evolve faster than ever before, and threats are no longer dependent on a single exploit mechanism. Furthermore, it’s not just network-level security you must be concerned with, for which firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) were developed, but content (data) level security as well. Messaging security, antivirus, antispam, Web filtering, antispyware…the list of required technologies grows.

Given this pressure, it seems like salt in the wound that IT executives also face the possibility of criminal and civil sanctions for failure to keep up with these threats. Regulatory and best practice guidelines like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II Accord, and PCI/DSS place an enormous due-diligence burden on IT executives. Not only must you keep up with the latest technologies for dealing with potential attacks, to prove that you did all you could to protect sensitive data and your networks, but you must be able to log traffic and events, as well. This is not only necessary for the legally-required audits that prove your compliance, but also for forensic operations, which are critical to discerning and quickly remediating weaknesses in your security regime.

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