EDITOR’S QUESTION
NICOLAI SOLLING,
CTO AT HELP AG
I
n general there is an abundance
of lesser qualified IT staff, however
specialised experts are in high
demand. Specifically, within security we
see this, where finding the correct quality
of resources is an increasing challenge.
As a security service focused
organisation, we do have the benefit that
whenever we hire anyone we can deliver
a very strong learning environment
through our senior resources, and thereby
build up a lot of the competences within
the organisation. But for an organisation
which does not necessarily have a
security practice or a security team, this
environment is impossible to provide
and therefore the approach of internal
enablement can be very challenging if
not impossible.
CIOs must first identify whether their
challenge is truly about the lack of skills,
or whether it is that their organisation
fails to attract and retain skilled
personnel. The question will always
be about skill sets of existing in-house
IT resources. With this in mind, it is
essential that CIOs partner with the
right consultants and IT partners who
specialise solely in particular areas of IT.
Specialisation means that these
organisations closely follow market
trends and invest in training their
employees on the latest technologies.
These partners are therefore capable
of extending their expertise to the
customer’s implementation and training
the in-house team to utilise the systems
to their full potential.
I also think any organisation should
ask themselves if they even want to
retain the skills or maybe outsource
the required competence area. In
certain areas, such as security event
management, most customers will
be incapable of delivering the same
www.intelligentcio.com
quality, competence and response as a
managed services provider.
These services help move IT budgets
from intimidating CapEx to more
manageable OpEx while trusting
the IT infrastructure to a team of
qualified experts. As Managed Service
Providers (MSPs) have large pools
of clients, they can invest in best-of-
breed technologies that customers
(especially SMBs and SMEs) would not
be able to afford.
MSPs also gain experience and insights
from working with their large client
bases which gives them a much broader
understanding of the IT requirements
in the region. The pay-as-you-go model
lends itself to both upward or even
downward scalability. Finally, availability
is also a factor as with a MSP, the
customers gets 24x7 support with
assured 99%+ availability which ensures
that business is always on.
Of course, all of this should never be
done without understanding the risk
to your data, who is managing these
events and where data is stored. Help
AG’s managed security services is
unique in the sense that the customers
data never leaves their premises
and all consultants operating the
environment and analysing events are
local to our organisation.
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