What Is Cybersecurity Staffing?

by | Dec 23, 2022

There’s barely any reason to highlight how crucial cybersecurity is these days, but knowing that there are about 2,244 attacks every day – almost 1 cyberattack every 39 seconds – definitely makes the matter crystal clear. A critical need for cybersecurity experts exists, and how companies choose to fulfill it varies depending on each organization. Still, there’s one IT hiring trend that’s impossible to ignore: cybersecurity staffing.

What Is Cybersecurity Staffing?

Cybersecurity staffing is the practice of outsourcing cybersecurity experts through a third-party cybersecurity staffing agency. This hiring strategy will help you support your internal IT department, or build one from scratch, allowing you to hire cybersecurity professionals with the aid of an external recruitment team with greater agility and often lower costs than can be achieved internally. Cybersecurity staff augmentation tends to involve hiring remote experts and thus recruit from a larger talent pool and allow nearshore or offshore outsourcing. Although many firms have hybrid work from home and in-office strategies, cybersecurity specialists have such a high demand that firms need to be flexible if they want access to talent. And if people are going to be remote then it makes no difference if they are sitting in their pajamas in New York City or in Rio de Janeiro. Both of these outsourcing strategies help you hire remote cybersecurity professionals, with the difference that nearshoring involves recruiting experts from countries closer to your company’s place of origin yet not in USA. With that said, cybersecurity staffing agencies have a dedicated international network of IT professionals ready to deploy and start working for your organization in a matter of weeks, no matter where they’re from.

What is the difference between cybersecurity staffing and cybersecurity consulting?

The differences between cybersecurity staffing and cybersecurity consulting are very nuanced, but there’s a primary factor that separates each strategy from one another. This is the nature of the cybersecurity solutions each one of these approaches can offer. For starters, IT consulting generally means an outside team handles your cybersecurity operations without you getting really involved and simply communicating through regular reports. On the other hand, cybersecurity staffing provides you with a dedicated team of professionals that integrate into your in-house team as contractors, yet you are responsible for directing them, managing their workload, and leading the overall security strategy. The results can be virtually the same – cybersecurity measures that work for your business – but only staffing grants you complete access to a team dedicated to the safety of your data. Through staff augmentation, you can hire cybersecurity experts both for long and short-term projects, depending on your organization’s specific needs. That’s a key advantage that consulting cannot provide. In consulting, you have shared resources and although solutions such as managed security are often necessary for organizations that are just starting on their cybersecurity risk management journey, you will always need people that can connect the dots given that managed security services providers and their portfolio of services are by definition limited to a specific scope. Cybersecurity is broad and complex and always cuts across multiple areas of business and technology.

What roles can a cybersecurity staffing agency help you fill?

There are different cybersecurity roles that need to be filled within an organization, and a staffing agency can help you hire experts for all of them. Here are some of the most popular cybersecurity positions to recruit for with a staffing agency:

  • Cybersecurity Analyst
  • Cybersecurity Manager
  • Vulnerability Analyst
  • Penetration Tester
  • Systems Engineer
  • Cybersecurity Administrator
  • Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Analyst
  • Chief Information Security Officer

Benefits of cybersecurity staffing

1. Access to expert professionals on demand.

One of the main benefits of cybersecurity staffing is the ability to access a large pool of international IT professionals through a nearshoring and staff augmentation agency. These remote cybersecurity experts have full availability to join your projects and are usually trained in more than one tech stack, which allows them to give you their full support for the duration of your partnership. If all goes then they grow with your company as needs evolve, which lowers risk because you are working with people you know. With cybersecurity staff augmentation, there’s no longer a need to struggle to find qualified candidates within a close range of your company’s headquarters due to the cybersecurity talent gap. By simply hiring a staffing agency to find specialists for you, your organization can build a bigger and more diverse cybersecurity team. One of the main benefits of cybersecurity staffing is the ability to access a large pool of international IT professionals through a nearshoring and staff augmentation agency. These remote cybersecurity experts have full availability to join your projects and are usually trained in more than one tech stack, which allows them to give you their full support for the duration of your partnership. If all goes then they grow with your company as needs evolve, which lowers risk because you are working with people you know. With cybersecurity staff augmentation, there’s no longer a need to struggle to find qualified candidates within a close range of your company’s headquarters due to the cybersecurity talent gap. By simply hiring a staffing agency to find specialists for you, your organization can build a bigger and more diverse cybersecurity team. 2. Hire cybersecurity professionals for a fraction of the cost. Who wouldn’t prefer to hire top cybersecurity professionals faster and for a lower price? This is a unique possibility that cybersecurity staffing agencies can offer thanks to their nearshore outsourcing capabilities. When you choose to hire Latin American cybersecurity experts instead of local professionals, you can save as much as 60% on IT rates. You don’t have to worry about billing either, as most cybersecurity staff augmentation agencies handle all payments to these remote team members including deductions according to the laws of the country of origen. The staffing agency can offen perform other imporant services such as background checks and ongoing professional development of engineers.

3. Cybersecurity staffing enhances the remote work experience.

Remote work has long become the norm for the IT industry, with cybersecurity protections being a crucial element to the success of these new work arrangements. Because cybersecurity helps to keep all of your team’s data safe and prevent it from falling into the hands of hackers, it allows remote teams to thrive and conduct day-to-day operations without any underlying concerns or worries about cyber attacks. 4. Speed-up recruitment procedures. Traditional hiring practices demand a considerable amount of time, money, and resources. Recruiting an in-house candidate can take months, at the risk of not even finding the right fit by the end of the process. On the contrary, cybersecurity staffing has a shorter timeline, thanks to the pre-existing network of cybersecurity professionals from all over the world. Staff augmentation agencies such as CyberWarrior recruit experts from these pre-vetted networks and interview them in just a few days to ensure they’re right for your project. In some cases, engineers and the cybersecurity staffing agency have long-standing relationships and so the firm can speak on a very personal level about intangibles that make the candidate particularly a good fit for a role. Resumes are one thing and another entirely is the perspective from having worked multiple projects with someone.

5. Staff flexibility and scalability.

Finally, the last one of the key benefits of cybersecurity staffing is composed of both the flexibility and scalability that it offers to the organizations that choose this strategy. Unlike traditional in-house hiring, cybersecurity staff augmentation lets you hire IT professionals for as long as you need to without committing to a long-term salaried contract, not to mention mitigating the risk associated with employment laws announces that vary from country to country. Your company can work with cybersecurity contractors for short or long-term projects and part ways with them the moment their services aren’t needed anymore, no strings attached.

Are you looking to hire cybersecurity experts in Latin America?

Now that you know the ins and out of cybersecurity staffing, you might be ready to hire cybersecurity professionals in Latin America. This nearshoring strategy is best done with the support of a specialized agency, like us, CyberWarrior.com. Our team can help you hire IT professionals from all over the world with the right assistance during every step of the process. As a cybersecurity staffing agency, we handle everything from vetting to billing and ensure your new team member is the perfect fit for your company. Contact us today to learn more about our services!

Are you interested in learning cybersecurity?