I had lunch last month with a CEO who told me he’d just hired his first “security guy.”
“Finally,” he said, relieved. “Now we’re protected.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that one person can’t possibly secure a modern business. Not because they’re incompetent, but because the job is fundamentally impossible for a single individual.
Three months later, his “security guy” quit. Burned out. Overwhelmed. The CEO called asking if we could help.
This conversation happens constantly. Business leaders understand they need cybersecurity, but they don’t understand what cybersecurity actually requires. They think hiring one person solves the problem. It doesn’t.
The real question isn’t whether to hire someone or use a managed service. The real question is: what does effective security actually require, and how can your business realistically achieve it?
The Illusion of the “Security Person”
Here’s what most business leaders imagine when they think about hiring for security:
One smart person sits at a computer monitoring things. Threats appear. They stop them. Everyone sleeps better at night.
It’s a comforting image. It’s also completely disconnected from reality.
Modern cybersecurity isn’t a person watching a screen. It’s a complex operation requiring multiple specialized skills, diverse technologies, and constant vigilance across dozens of potential attack vectors.
Think about what actually needs to happen. Someone needs to:
- Configure and maintain your firewall.
- Monitor endpoint security across all devices.
- Analyze suspicious emails and determine which are legitimate and which are phishing attempts.
- Review system logs looking for anomalies.
- Investigate when something looks wrong.
- Respond when an actual incident occurs.
- Ensure compliance with regulations.
- Train employees.
- Test your defenses regularly.
- Stay current on emerging threats.
- Manage relationships with technology vendors.
Oh, and someone needs to do all of this at three in the morning when attackers decide to strike. One person cannot do this. It’s not humanly possible.
What In-House Security Actually Costs
Let’s talk about what building an effective in-house security operation really involves, beyond the fantasy of hiring “a security person.”
You need a team. Not a person. A team.
At minimum, you need:
- Someone with strategic oversight who can talk to executives about risk and make decisions about security architecture.
- People who can actually implement security technologies across your infrastructure.
- Analysts who can monitor systems, investigate alerts, and respond to incidents.
- And critically, you need enough people to provide coverage beyond business hours, because attackers don’t only work nine to five.
Each of these roles requires different expertise. The strategic person needs business acumen and risk management skills. The implementation person needs deep technical knowledge. The analysts need investigative abilities and threat intelligence understanding. Finding people who combine all these skills in one individual is essentially impossible, which is why effective security requires multiple specialists.
Now let’s talk about what these people cost. Experienced security professionals command high salaries because demand far exceeds supply. A qualified security manager or CISO runs six figures easily. Security engineers and analysts aren’t far behind. Add benefits, training, certifications, conferences, and the inevitable recruitment costs when people leave for better opportunities, and personnel expenses add up quickly.But people are only part of the cost. They need tools to do their jobs effectively. Security technologies aren’t cheap. You need:
- Systems to aggregate and analyze logs from across your infrastructure.
- Endpoint protection that goes beyond basic antivirus.
- Email security to catch phishing attempts.
- Network monitoring to detect intrusions.
- Vulnerability scanning to identify weaknesses before attackers do.
- Threat intelligence feeds to know what attackers are currently using.
- Backup and recovery systems.
- Identity management.
- The list goes on.
Each of these technologies costs money—not just for initial purchase but for ongoing licensing, maintenance, and updates. And crucially, each requires expertise to configure, tune, and operate effectively. Buying a sophisticated security tool and letting it sit misconfigured helps nobody.
When you add it all up honestly—personnel, technology, training, infrastructure, and all the hidden costs—an effective in-house security operation for a small to medium business easily reaches seven figures annually. Even a bare-bones team with limited coverage runs several hundred thousand dollars per year at minimum.
Most business leaders are shocked when they see the real numbers. They expected maybe one or two hundred thousand dollars. The reality is five to ten times higher.
The Challenges Nobody Talks About
Cost is only part of the story. Even if you have the budget, building an in-house security team presents challenges that don’t appear in any job description.
First, there’s the hiring problem. Cybersecurity has a massive talent shortage. Millions of positions go unfilled globally because there simply aren’t enough qualified people. You’re competing with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and well-funded startups, all trying to hire from the same limited pool. The qualified candidates have their pick of opportunities. Why would they choose your company
Even if you successfully recruit someone great, keeping them is harder. Security professionals are constantly recruited. They get regular offers for more money, better titles, or more interesting challenges. Retention in cybersecurity is notoriously difficult. Losing a key security person sets you back months—you lose their institutional knowledge, you lose coverage while you recruit a replacement, you pay recruitment fees, and you start the onboarding process from scratch.
Then there’s the knowledge problem. Cybersecurity changes constantly. New threats emerge weekly. Attack techniques evolve. Technologies advance. Regulations change. Your team needs continuous training and education just to stay current. This takes time and money, and even then, staying ahead of the threat landscape is nearly impossible for a small team.
There’s also the operational burden. Your in-house team needs management, just like any other department. Someone needs to set priorities, resolve conflicts, conduct performance reviews, manage budgets, and handle all the normal overhead of running a team. This creates additional work for your organization beyond just “doing security.”
And perhaps most significantly, there’s the coverage problem. Cyber threats don’t respect business hours. Attacks happen at midnight, on weekends, during holidays. If you want true twenty-four-seven protection, you need enough people to staff multiple shifts. This multiplies your personnel costs significantly. Most small in-house teams can only provide business hours coverage, leaving your organization vulnerable outside those hours.
What Managed Security Services Actually Provide
Now let’s talk about the alternative: managed security services. The concept is straightforward. Instead of building your own security operation, you contract with a provider who operates security on your behalf. They provide the technology, the expertise, the monitoring, and the response capabilities. You get the protection without the overhead of building and managing a team.
But what does this actually mean in practice? A managed security service operates what’s called a Security Operations Center—essentially a dedicated facility with security analysts monitoring client environments around the clock. These aren’t individual consultants working from home. They’re teams of specialists with defined roles, processes, and escalation procedures, all focused on detecting and responding to threats.
The technology is included. The provider deploys enterprise-grade security tools across your environment—the same tools that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if you bought them yourself. They handle configuration, tuning, updates, and maintenance. You don’t purchase licenses, manage renewals, or worry about version compatibility. The technology just works, and the provider ensures it stays current.
The monitoring is continuous. While your employees sleep, while you’re on vacation, while your office is closed for holidays, the managed service team is watching your systems. Alerts don’t wait until Monday morning. Suspicious activity at two AM gets investigated immediately. Threats get contained before they spread.
The expertise is distributed. Instead of depending on one or two people who might be sick, on vacation, or between jobs, you have access to an entire team of specialists. Different analysts handle different aspects of security. If someone doesn’t know how to investigate a particular type of attack, someone else on the team does. The collective knowledge of the team far exceeds what any individual could possess.
Response happens at machine speed. When something malicious is detected, automated systems can take immediate action—isolating infected endpoints, blocking malicious connections, terminating suspicious processes. Human analysts oversee and guide the response, but the initial containment happens faster than any human could manually react.
Threat intelligence is current. Managed service providers aggregate threat data from all their clients and from global intelligence sources. When a new attack technique emerges, the entire provider learns about it simultaneously and can protect all clients immediately. Your in-house team would need to discover, analyze, and respond to each new threat independently.
And perhaps most importantly, managed services scale with your needs. As your business grows, as you add employees and locations, as your infrastructure becomes more complex, the managed service adapts. You don’t need to hire more people, buy more tools, or build more capacity. The provider handles growth transparently.
The Hybrid Approach Nobody Mentions
Here’s something most articles about this topic don’t discuss: you don’t have to choose one approach exclusively.
Many successful security programs use a hybrid model. They keep certain security functions in-house while outsourcing others to managed services.
A common hybrid approach is to have one or two internal security people focused on strategy, governance, and internal coordination, while a managed service handles the operational heavy lifting—monitoring, incident response, threat hunting, and technology management.
The internal person becomes your security leader and advocate. They understand your business, represent security in strategic discussions, manage relationships with the managed service provider, and handle internal security initiatives like employee training and policy development. But they’re not trying to monitor systems at three in the morning or investigate every security alert. The managed service handles the operational burden.
This hybrid approach provides several benefits.
- You have internal security expertise and advocacy without needing to build an entire team.
- You get the operational capabilities and coverage of a managed service without completely outsourcing security.
- Your internal person provides oversight of the managed service, ensuring they’re performing effectively and acting in your best interest.
The cost of this hybrid approach sits between pure in-house and pure managed service. You’re paying for one or two internal people plus the managed service contract. But you’re getting capabilities that would require a much larger in-house team to achieve independently.
Not every business needs a hybrid approach. Smaller companies can often rely entirely on managed services. But for mid-sized organizations with complex requirements, hybrid models often provide the best balance of control, capability, and cost.
How to Decide What’s Right for Your Business
So how do you actually make this decision for your specific situation?
Start by being honest about your business size and security needs. If you’re a company with fewer than a hundred employees, building an effective in-house security team is probably unrealistic. The costs are too high, the talent too hard to find, and the operational complexity too great. Managed services almost certainly make more sense.
As you grow past a hundred employees and toward several hundred, the decision becomes less clear. You might be able to afford an in-house person or two, but probably not a full team. This is where hybrid approaches often make sense—some internal capability combined with managed service support.
Once you’re approaching a thousand employees or dealing with very sensitive data in regulated industries, building in-house capacity becomes more viable. You have the budget, the organizational need, and potentially the ability to offer career growth that helps with recruitment and retention. But even at this scale, many companies choose managed services or hybrid approaches because the operational benefits outweigh the desire for direct control.
Consider your industry and regulatory requirements. If you’re in healthcare dealing with patient data, or finance handling financial information, or any regulated industry with specific compliance requirements, you need to evaluate whether managed service providers can meet those requirements. Most can, but you need to verify.
Think about your existing technical capabilities. Do you have IT staff who understand your infrastructure deeply? Can they work effectively with an external managed service provider? Or would bringing security in-house integrate more naturally with your current operations?
Consider your risk profile honestly. Are you a high-value target? Do you have data or intellectual property that competitors or criminals would actively try to steal? Higher risk might justify the investment in building in-house capability, while lower risk makes managed services more economically rational.
And finally, think about your organizational culture and preferences. Some leaders strongly prefer having direct employees they can manage and control. Others are comfortable outsourcing non-core functions to specialists. Neither approach is inherently wrong, but your preference matters for decision-making.
The Questions You Should Ask Managed Service Providers
If you’re leaning toward managed services, what should you look for in a provider?
- Start with coverage. What exactly is included in their service? Some providers only monitor and alert. Others include incident response and remediation. Others provide vulnerability management, compliance support, and strategic consulting. Make sure you understand what’s covered and what costs extra.
- Ask about their team structure. Who will actually be monitoring your environment? What are their qualifications and experience? How many clients does each analyst cover? What’s the escalation process when something serious is detected?
- Understand their technology stack. What tools will they deploy in your environment? Are these industry-leading solutions or lesser-known products? How do they handle updates and maintenance? What visibility will you have into what their tools are doing?
- Inquire about response procedures. When they detect a threat, what happens next? How quickly do they respond? What actions can they take automatically, and what requires your approval? How will they communicate with you during an incident?
- Ask about their operational metrics. What’s their average time to detect threats? How quickly do they respond? What’s their false positive rate? How many incidents do they typically handle for clients your size? Any reputable provider should be able to share general performance data.
- Discuss their reporting and communication. How often will you receive reports about your security posture? What format do reports take? Who is your primary point of contact? How do you reach them when you have questions or concerns?
- Understand their client onboarding process. How long does implementation take? What’s required from your team during onboarding? How do they learn about your environment and business? What does the first ninety days look like?
- And critically, ask about their approach to continuous improvement. Security isn’t a one-time setup. How do they tune and optimize their monitoring over time? How do they reduce false positives? How do they adapt to changes in your environment?
The answers to these questions will tell you whether a provider is sophisticated and professional, or whether they’re just reselling technology without real operational capability.
The Bottom Line
Here’s what I tell every business leader who asks me this question:
Building an effective in-house security operation is expensive, operationally complex, and requires ongoing investment in people, technology, and expertise. It provides direct control and can be tailored precisely to your needs, but only if you have the budget and organizational capacity to do it right. Doing it poorly is worse than not doing it at all.
Managed security services provide enterprise-grade capabilities at a fraction of the cost of building equivalent in-house capacity. You get professional monitoring, current threat intelligence, and round-the-clock coverage without the overhead of managing a security team. The trade-off is less direct control and dependency on an external provider.
For most small to medium businesses, managed services make more sense. The economics are compelling, the operational benefits are significant, and the quality of protection typically exceeds what you could build in-house with similar budget.
For larger organizations or those with very specific requirements, hybrid approaches often work best—maintaining some internal capability while leveraging managed services for operational monitoring and response.
The worst option is trying to do security on the cheap—hiring one person, giving them inadequate tools and support, and expecting them to protect your entire organization. This creates the illusion of security without the reality. Your employee burns out, your organization remains vulnerable, and you’ve wasted time and money.
Whatever you choose, choose deliberately. Understand what you’re getting, what you’re giving up, and what it will cost. Security is too important to approach casually.
Your business is too valuable to leave unprotected. The question isn’t whether to invest in security. The question is how to invest most effectively.
Evaluate Your Security Approach Today
Ares360 provides fully managed cybersecurity for small and medium businesses—enterprise-grade protection without the complexity and cost of building an in-house team.
Schedule a consultation and we’ll discuss:
- Your current security posture and gaps
- Whether in-house, managed, or hybrid makes sense for your specific situation
- What comprehensive protection actually looks like for your business
- Transparent pricing and implementation timeline
Because effective security shouldn’t require building an entire team from scratch.
Uriel Peña
Cybersecurity Consultant | Arestech
Enterprise-grade protection in a single cybersecurity platform — Comprehensive. Managed. Simple.
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