Businesses are always looking for ways to control and reduce the cost of doing business as well as gain a competitive advantage over their respective competitors. The constant pressure of doing more with less has introduced many offerings designed to reduce the cost and complexity of the IT/OT infrastructures that support the business.

Let’s take a look at some offerings that have been introduced to address these challenges.

Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are very attractive. These offerings had a slow adoption rate early on when they were considered risky, but now, they are widely adopted. Today, they help control and reduce the cost of on-prem infrastructures while providing the flexibility to spin up and down additional computing capacity as required by the business. These offerings address one piece of the puzzle, the cost of the infrastructure.

There are other critical and expensive pieces in the puzzle called “the cost of doing business.” One challenge I hear most frequently is the cost and/or lack of skilled personnel. Tripwire conducted a skill gap survey with 336 IT security professionals in 2019 that showed some alarming statistics. In that survey, 96% of respondents said they were experiencing or expecting difficulty in staffing security teams. Skilled personnel are expensive. The cost of ongoing training is expensive. These two critical components are typically the first to be cut from the IT budget. Simply, most companies cannot afford to hire a highly skilled FTE and dedicate them to one specific function.

Take a Security Analyst (SA), for example. The Security Analyst’s knowledge represents a highly sought after and rather expensive skill set. Hiring a SA and dedicating them to one specific discipline, platform or application is rarely ever implemented in practice, as it is just too (Read more...)