Survey: Outsourcing Often Comes with Security Risk

Although outsourcing has its benefits, it often comes with high risk, according to a recent study commissioned by Savvis.

Outsourcing of the Information Security (IS) infrastructure is set to increase by almost 67 percent globally by 2020. This has driven organizations to improve their Information Security posture to prevent devastating breaches.

In 2012, cloud-based email service provider Epsilon suffered a security breach that made an impact on about 75 clients and compromised over 60 million personal names and email addresses.

Savvis notes that these kinds of security breaches can be very expensive and detrimental to a company's reputation.

Recognizing this issue, EC-Council addressed the security challenges of outsourcing during a panel discussion at its CISO Executive Summit in December 2011.

CISO Executive Summit panel was chaired by Jeff Tutton, president of global security and compliance at Intersec worldwide.

This discussion indicated that globally, more than 60 percent of organizations believe that management of IT infrastructure domestically does not have any competitive advantages.

This belief is driving organizations to move operations offshore but they have to face challenges in countries where offshore outsourcing does not have any data privacy laws.

This lack of law enforcement means often confidential information is vulnerable to security breaches.

Companies need to employ executive IS leaders to overcome these challenges as they will develop methods to protect the IT infrastructure when outsourcing in-house responsibilities.

Businesses can also use platforms such as EC-Council's (News - Alert) CISO Executive Summit Series to solve security issues. They can also invest in continuous education and knowledge sharing that will solve the day to day security problems faced by top-executives.

Savvis, a CenturyLink company, is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises. The company was in news last month for providing ultra low latency connectivity to Eris Exchange.