With cybersecurity professionals in high demand and a global labor shortage in the industry, hiring in-house talent has become increasingly expensive. What’s more, internal security teams require ongoing resources to ensure their effectiveness against a constantly changing threat landscape—a luxury that may now only be available to enterprise-level organizations.

“What we see across all industries across the world is that the cybersecurity threats are only intensifying. It’s not just cyber criminals who are hoping to cash in on ransomware, it’s also nation state actors like Russia and North Korea that want to damage supply chains to their benefit. Protecting against those threats is not a part-time job. It takes trained, skilled, and experienced people who focus on cybersecurity every day, and only large enterprises can afford to do it in-house. It’s a very expensive proposition,” says Luis Alvarez, President and CEO of Alvarez Technology Group.

The fact of the matter is that these days only enterprise-level business can afford the most experienced and expert staff. Yet 43 percent of all data breaches involve small or medium size businesses. Given that a single attack can knock a business offline for hours (at least eight in most cases, according to CISCO) if not days, weeks and months, making the right hires and assuring that they have the time and capacity they need, is crucial. For many SMEs, it’s simply not realistic.

“Outsourcing to a certified managed security services provider is the best, affordable option for most businesses to get the protections in place that they need to be compliant with modern cybersecurity,” Alvarez says.

Contracting to a managed security services provider (MSP) is a time- and cost-effective solution that gives the organization access to the latest and greatest security solutions, including 24/7 network monitoring. MSP experts understand best practices—not just in cybersecurity but in related regulatory and legal compliance—and can keep an eye on the changing needs of complex and often-growing infrastructure. An MSP is flexible by definition, and well-positioned to customize for your particular business niche. It can also evolve its services as needed, whether that’s to scale up as the organization grows, or to adapt to the latest attack vectors.

In this leaner operating model, organizations can also streamline their IT costs such as licensing, hardware, staff, cloud storage, and more. Typically they will include data storage and backup which simplifies data restoration where needed.

Best of all, a third-party security provider will be proactive in identifying and mitigating threats before they become incidents. It’s been well-reported that most incidents occur due to human error, and more common vulnerabilities and exposures emerge every day.

At the same time, we know that 60 percent of businesses close within six months after a data breach event. Having cost-effective cybersecurity solutions that can proactively manage modern-day cyber risks is for many SMEs a life-saving measure.