Outsourcing Security: Hosted, Managed and Cloud

Outsourcing security is still mostly about focusing the work of in-house security staff on the more strategic areas of security. High-volume, generally untargeted attacks and nuisances like spam and corrupt emails could easily consume all available staff time, but they are not strategic and so are the most frequently outsourced. Cloud is the favorite option for these services, giving both simplicity and scalability; it displaces more traditional forms of hosted security. Managed security is more broadly used than traditional hosted though less than cloud, and is focused on offloading the most onerous in-house security tasks, such as managing and monitoring firewalls and IDS/IPS systems. Again, the goal is to focus in-house staff on more strategic pursuits.