Kinetic IT's Intel-backed security hub sees boom in managed services

One of Australia's largest privately owned IT service providers, Kinetic IT, has turned Australia's lack of cybersecurity skills into a lucrative revenue stream for managed security services.

The Perth-headquartered company opened its new security operations centre in 2015, and increased headcount by around 300 people in the 2015 calendar year.

Kinetic IT’s security operations manager, Chris Bolan, attributed increased interest in the managed security service provider (MSSP) model to a growing preference for companies to shift from capital expenditure-intensive security models to operational expenditure ones.

In some cases, Bolan explained, companies were spending millions on security devices but then being told they had to spend even more on expertise to monitor them correctly. “We can give them what they need as a service but also provide that ongoing eyes-on-glass. Some may only need to expertise for a month or two because it’s a short-term project for operational requirements.

“So, again we’re able to scale up and scale down quickly to match what they actually need,” Bolan said.

Kevin O’Sullivan, Kinetic IT’s director of services for security, said that the other key challenge for skills was that security threat landscape was evolving too rapidly for the labour supply in IT security.

While traditional roles were still needed, he said, a more diverse set of skills was required to mitigate increasingly sophisticated forms of attack.

The growth of the MSSP model is backed up by new research sponsored by Kinetic IT’s regional security partner, Intel Security, which predicted Australian business’ adoption of managed security services will spike.

The research, which emerged from a broader of about 450 Australian businesses conducted for Privacy Awareness Week, revealed that 27 percent of those not using an MSSP would consider doing so in the next 12 months.

Businesses with 1,000 to 2,000 employees showed the most interest, with 77 percent reporting that they would consider using an MSSP some time in the next 12 months.

Joel Camissar, director of Intel Security’s Asia Pacific, MSP and cloud business, said that Australia’s lack of skilled IT security professionals remained a very live issue for the country with the level of training and experience required being the main barrier.

“I would argue that it takes longer to train a well-rounded security professional than it does a medical professional in terms of the fact that they need a vast range of experience across many siloes of IT,” he said.

Kinetic IT has been growing rapidly in recent years mainly due to major customer wins with Victoria Police and Qantas, telling CRN in late December that it was on track to crack $172.5 million in the 2016 financial year.