With economic uncertainty and increasing pressure to optimise budgets, IT departments are facing a strategic dilemma regarding cyber security. The increasing number and complexity of attacks is forcing investment, but companies are not only allocating too few resources, but often allocating them in an inefficient way.
The key question is no longer “whether to invest?” but “how to invest?” – by building costly competences internally, or perhaps by outsourcing defence to specialised external partners.
The trap of excess tools and lost synergies
A common problem in organisations is the perception of IT security as a technological arms race. In practice, this leads to the deployment of multiple point solutions whose functions often overlap.
The result is not only an uncontrolled increase in licence costs, but above all operational chaos. Scattered alarm management, high susceptibility to configuration errors and increased response times are the consequences of the lack of an integrated approach.
Today’s cyber security strategy must combine three pillars: security, risk management and regulatory compliance. In many companies, these areas operate as separate silos with their own budgets, preventing the exploitation of natural synergies.
Successful cyber defence does not depend on the number of tools installed, but on their intelligent integration, ease of use and ability to provide a unified view of the entire attack surface – from servers to the cloud to business applications.
The true cost of an internal security team
Many companies, especially in the SME sector, are stuck with the ‘set it and forget it’ strategy familiar from the era of traditional anti-virus. However, modern protection is a continuous process, requiring 24/7 monitoring of activity, analysis of anomalies and immediate response. This in turn generates huge, often underestimated costs.
Building and maintaining an internal Security Operations Centre ( SOC) is an investment that goes far beyond the purchase of software. Providing 24/7 staffing requires a minimum of five, and in practice up to eight, analysts.
Given that the market salary for an experienced cyber security specialist in Poland often exceeds PLN 20,000 per month, the salary cost alone can easily exceed PLN 1.5 million per year.
Added to this is the expense of recruiting in an extremely competitive market, months of training, keeping specialists in-house and expensive licences for analytics platforms and threat data (Threat Intelligence).
In large organisations, the time from hiring an employee to full productivity can be many months, further delaying the return on investment.
Outsourcing as added value, not just a cost
In this context, services such as Managed Detection and Response (MDR) or managed SOC become a strategic alternative. Evaluating them solely through the lens of cost is short-sighted and ignores the fundamental added value they bring to an organisation.
Firstly, modern MDR services cover the entire IT infrastructure – from traditional client-server architecture, to internal networks, to cloud environments, to collaboration tools such as Microsoft 365. In doing so, they provide consistent and holistic monitoring.
Secondly, an external SOC is access to the knowledge and experience of a team of experts who analyse complex attacks across industries and regions on a daily basis. Such a perspective is almost impossible to replicate inside a single company. It allows us to proactively identify threats and assess their real impact on the organisation based on global trends.
Finally, outsourcing monitoring tasks does not mean losing control. Reputable providers operate on a partnership basis, working closely with the in-house IT team. The company does not outsource its data or applications, but only delegates the task of continuously protecting them, freeing up its own resources to focus on strategic business development.
The final decision on a preservation model should be preceded by an honest analysis of skills and process gaps. Critical digital assets should be identified and an honest assessment should be made of whether the tools and skills available are sufficient to protect them. For many companies, the answer to the question “build or buy?” is becoming increasingly obvious.
