Security: insource, outsource or use the force?

By Stephen Withers
Saturday, 31 May 2008 07:26

Home IT

IDC predicts that 1800 exabytes of data will be created during 2018, and that compliance issues will mean 85 percent of it will have to be managed. How will organisations be able to keep their share of that data mountain secure?

According to IDC's Tim Dillon, CIOs see budget constraints as their biggest security challenge, followed by the lack of skilled staff and either not having an appropriate security policy or failures to follow it.

After all, IDC’s prediction of 1800 exabytes of data created in 2018 is a huge amount of data, and it will all need to be stored somewhere, costing a lot of money even as storage technologies grow ever larger.

How much is 1 single Exabyte, you ask? It’s 1,024 petabytes, or 1,048,576 terabyes, or a whopping 1,073,741,824 gigabytes. Over a billion gigabytes is one heck of a lot of data.

Then there’s the need for skilled staff. Hey, if we’re going through a skills shortage in 2008, can we have any real confidence it will be sorted by 2018?

So, the staffing issue may make outsourced security services seem attractive, but it seems the size of an organisation has an impact on whether this option is taken up.

Roark Pollack, director of product marketing at security vendor TippingPoint, suggests bigger companies are more likely to keep at least some of function in house, presumably to keep as tight a hold on sensitive company information as possible.

Furthermore, companies are usually unwilling to outsource everything to one supplier, so may pick one company for security assessments and another to actually deliver security services.

What do some companies like to do when things go wrong, and is there really solid choice in security services? Please read on to page 2.