CXO Insight Middle East Magazine - September 2019

In this issue

This month’s cover story is about managed security services, which is finding favour among enterprises of all sizes in the region. Until recently, outsourcing security to a third-party provider was unthinkable for many of these organisations. But, with the daily barrage of attacks and lack of expertise in-house to tackle these threats, the pendulum is slowly swinging towards MSSPs. For SMEs in particular, managed security makes more sense because they can outsource all basic security functions and don’t have to invest in security staff. As for large enterprises, the value proposition of an MSSP model is that they can spend more time on serious stuff such as threat hunting and vulnerability management instead of being bogged down by day-to-day security operations. So, why isn’t everyone ceding their security control to thirdparty providers? The fact of the matter is CISOs are still struggling to sell the managed services story to their boards because there are no clear metrics to gauge RoI. To address this, MSSPs in the region will have to do a better job of packaging their offerings with a compelling business case, and not just harp on the cost factor.