Archive for July, 2015

Outsourcing and security

July 30th, 2015  |  Published in Uncategorized

Who is your IT outsourcing firm working for?

The driving force behind outsourcing and offshoring is to find the cheapest IT talent on the planet. The people hired to do this work usually do not have a college education. They are young and have no experience. They are paid $7 to $15 an hour. The background and qualification checks are superficial at best. They have some IT training, but most of what they know is taught on the job. Now imagine how easy it would be for a cyber criminal to insert himself (or herself) into an outsourcing firm. Imagine how easy it would be to bribe and compromise a worker for an outsourcing firm. Since no one at the outsourcing firm works for your business it is very easy for cyber criminals to operate unnoticed. Edward Snowden used other people’s ID’s to access and copy data. Most cyber criminals these days are smart enough to cover their tracks. Given the weak management at many outsourcing firms, if they detected a problem they’d probably fire the innocent and completely miss what was really going on.

The outsourcing and offshoring of IT makes cyber crime a lot easier.

At least some of these concerns also apply to “cloud” vendors.