REDUCED IT spending and the high cost for many organisations of employing specialist security professionals are two of the factors driving growth at Ward Solutions. Earlier this week the Dublin-based IT security provider announced the creation of 20 new jobs over the next two years and investment of €3 million in the business.
A security and cybercrime survey launched earlier this month by Deloitte supports Ward’s outlook. It found 50 per cent of large Irish organisations have no plans to hire additional IT security professionals despite increasing levels of security breaches.
One-third of the organisations polled for the survey said they experienced between one and five security breaches last year. Some 60 per cent are only partially ready to respond to an incident, as they lack specialist systems in place to detect incidents.
“Nobody in this environment is getting budgets for additional headcount, particularly in non-core areas. You’re certainly not getting budget for compliance and IT resources,” said Ward’s chief executive, Pat Larkin.
“Our vision is to make customers more secure and do it in a way that takes overhead off them and reduces their cost of compliance.”
Mr Larkin said the arrival of stronger data protection rules, along with security regulations such as the PCI DSS standard for payment systems, is placing further pressure on many organisations to enhance their security.
“The latitude for banana skins for those organisations has got smaller. The level of fraud and risk has gone up,” he said.
Ward plans to offer information security services on an outsourced basis, which it claims is more cost-effective for businesses than having to recruit and retain skilled staff. The company recently launched an outsourced 24/7 information security and data protection service at a fraction of the cost of resourcing such a role in-house.
The €3 million funding will come from the company’s cash reserves as well as trading profits over the next three years.
Most of the jobs will be in technical roles, including software development, consultancy, managed services and field support.
This week’s announcement is “a much more aggressive investment” than the €1.5 million spent on research and development since 2009, Mr Larkin added.
Since 2009, Ward Solutions has doubled in size to 40 people, increased its revenues by 20 per cent year-on-year and acquired more than 120 new customers.
The company sells primarily to mid-sized and large customers in telecoms, healthcare, utilities and emergency services, as well as to the higher education and financial services sectors.
Revenue comes predominantly from consultancy and managed services, with about 20 per cent derived purely from product sales, Mr Larkin said.
