Decision guide
In-house vs outsourced cybersecurity for mid-market businesses
Below a few hundred staff, building a genuine internal security function is impractical, mostly because round-the-clock monitoring needs a rota rather than a person. What works is owning security governance internally, deciding risk appetite, policy and priorities, and outsourcing detection and response. Outsourcing the decisions rather than the operations is the mistake to avoid.
What is actually being compared
- Fully in-house
- Your own security staff, tooling and monitoring.
- Fully outsourced
- A provider owns tooling, monitoring and response.
- Hybrid
- Internal ownership of governance and risk, external detection and response.
Side by side
How they differ in practice
| Feature | Feature | Fully in-house | Fully outsourced | Hybrid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
24/7 monitoring | Needs a rota, so several people | Included | Included | |
Tooling cost | You buy and run it | Shared across the provider client base | Shared | |
Threat intelligence breadth | Limited to what you see | Broader, across many clients | Broader | |
Business context | Excellent | Weaker, improves over time | Excellent, held internally | |
Who owns risk decisions | You | Ambiguous, which is the risk | You, explicitly | |
Realistic below 250 staff | Rarely | Yes | Yes |
Keep in-house
- Risk appetite and what you are prepared to accept. No provider should be deciding that.
- Policy ownership and the final say on exceptions.
- The relationship with your auditors and regulators.
- Knowing which systems genuinely matter, which is business knowledge rather than security knowledge.
Outsource
- Detection and monitoring, because it needs continuous coverage.
- Tooling operation, because the licences and the expertise are expensive to hold for one estate.
- Incident response capability, which you need rarely and cannot build well for occasional use.
- Periodic assessment, where independence is the point.
The failure mode
- Outsourcing security and assuming risk went with it. It did not. A provider can operate controls and produce evidence; accountability for the business stays with the business, and any regulator will treat it that way.
When the other option is right
If you already have a capable internal security lead, adding a provider for governance advice is largely wasted spend. Buy monitoring and response instead, and keep the thinking in-house where it belongs.
Where to start regardless of model
- Get the basics in first: MFA everywhere, endpoint detection deployed properly, tested backup and centralised logging. Sophisticated monitoring on top of missing basics is money badly spent.
- Write down who owns risk decisions internally. If that is not clear, no outsourcing arrangement will fix it, and any regulator will look for it.
- Define what you expect a provider to do without asking you, and put it in the contract. Response authority agreed during an incident is response authority agreed too late.
- Check your logging retention against your actual obligation before buying detection. Detection on logs you do not keep is of limited use afterwards.
- Rehearse an incident once, on paper, with the people who would be involved. It reliably finds the gaps that a control review does not.
Questions
Common questions
Still deciding?
Talk it through with an engineer, not a salesperson
Tell us your situation and we will tell you which option fits, including when that is not us. Initial reply within 4 business hours.