Can you really outsource information security, or is the idea of having it taken off your hands just a mirage?

There are vendors who promise to take “everything” off your hands. 24/7 monitoring, detection, tools, and procedures: the idea is that, as an organization, you barely have to worry about it anymore. We don’t believe in slogans like “your security is our business.” Information security isn’t a product you buy and then forget about. It’s an ongoing process where technology, people, and behavior all come together. As soon as one of those elements is missing, gaps appear. As an organization, you can decide for yourself what level of risk you’re willing to accept, or you can let us help you find the right balance between security and functionality.

The first question organizations should ask themselves is therefore not, “Who can handle this for us?” but rather, “What role do we play in this ourselves?” Because no matter how good an external partner may be, there will always be employees who continue to click on suspicious emails, reuse passwords, and make poor decisions when under time pressure.

Taking the pressure off when it comes to information security sometimes feels like a mirage. From a distance, it looks like safety and peace of mind, but as soon as you get closer, it turns out to be an illusion. You think you’re protected, when in fact the real vulnerabilities lie within the organization. Employees who fail to recognize signs of digital threats. Management that has to rely on the IT department without having sufficient technical context themselves. Processes that exist only on paper, but which no one knows how to follow when the time comes because they’ve never been practiced. That’s exactly where things go wrong. Not because vendors aren’t doing their jobs, but because security can never be guaranteed by external factors alone.

Imagine an organization that has outsourced its entire IT and information security to a single external provider. There is trust, everything seems to be taken care of, and little attention is paid internally to cyber resilience—until that provider is compromised. The attacker gains access to multiple organizations at once because they all rely on the same link.

This is not a theoretical scenario. In October 2025, a large part of the digital infrastructure in Volendam went down after a local IT company was hacked. Many organizations relied on the same provider, resulting in a major impact. This shows that following the crowd when it comes to information security and cybersecurity is not always the right strategy.

Fully outsourcing information security sounds appealing, but in practice it is often costly and risky. After all, ultimate responsibility always remains with the organization itself: as a director, you can be held accountable for it. That is why information security always requires ownership throughout the entire organization.

In our experience, implementation under the direction of an external specialist delivers results: specialized knowledge from outside, ownership from within. This not only leads to lower costs but, above all, to better safeguards and faster decision-making in the event of incidents. A prerequisite, however, is that the external party looks beyond the technical aspects alone: it must report clearly to the right people, translate risks into their impact on the organization, and speak the language of the board and senior management. Only then will the right actions, priorities, and budgets be established.

There are mirages in the field of information security—unless you consider the logical connection between technology, processes, and people. That’s the approach we take. The advantage is that our pragmatic approach often allows us to reduce costs during implementation.

Cybersecurity as a Service and Maintaining Control Over Information Security?
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