In-house Cyber policing vs. Outsourcing: the latter wins hands down!


Taking a strong defence against cyber fraud and hacker attacks is proving to be a tricky question to many a digital-networked organization.

While, at one time entrepreneurs had no choice but to build their own security and risk mitigation teams within their IT department, the proliferation and pace at which this worldwide menace grew in recent years, has forced them to seek help from outside.

Today, the options are plenty out there in the digital world to access third party cyber security programs and applications. How much of it to be accessed, when, where, etc., are decision-making points faced by the prospects seeking such outsourced services.

Institutions have discovered that building an in-house cyber security cell would eventually turn out to be more expensive than procuring the services from other sources.

In one of the Whitepapers released by Radial on the subject, KC Fox, Vice President, Payments-Tax and Fraud, of Radial observed the following:

  1. Fund management is more than meets the eye: Because the strategies and modus operandi of fraudsters keep changing fast and mysteriously, it’s not as easy as hiring a consultant, set up a solution and move on. Such a ‘quick-fix’ program will eventually fail. There are several questions that address this issue in comparison.

a) Who is overall responsible to maintain the watch and ward of such situations?

b) How much of expensive corporate time and labour cost is it consuming? Moreover, it’s not a one-off situation and solution. Once a trend is caught in the planting of the malware, a separate analyst also would have to be included – which is another expense.

2. Manual review is a time-consuming option.
With only in-house data to work on, manual teams can only review a limited number of historical data. This is a laborious process.

Meanwhile, outsourced service agents aggregate historical customer data from several sources, so fewer transactions get flagged for manual review, since the customer’s habits are known.

  1. What you don’t know CAN hurt you.Another area of a blind spot is the availability of only in-house data. The benefit of outsourcing is that the third-party solution providers watch activity across multiple segments and sites, so if fraudsters launch a cross-site attack, they’ll know about it immediately.
  2. How will you handle the holiday rush?During holiday time, data transactions reach peak and the merchant volumes are on fast-growth rates. The volumes may increase by 100% of the present volumes and the safety and security need to be closely watched.

Yet, through all these, a balance of policing vs. relationship must be maintained so as not to upset the customer relationship.

  1. Who is liable for fraud that slips through? A good feature of outsourcing is that the responsibility of fraud losses can be transferred. When outsourced, this area is not a concern as opposed to the in-house version.

The above reasons are good enough to hand over the entire cyber security issue to the hands of an outsourced third party than the originator handling it themselves.

Fox said, “Before you build versus buy, understand the true cost and risk of building your team.”


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