Insource Or Outsource - When Protecting Your Brand, Does it Make Sense to Go it Alone?

Your brand is often the most tangible, valuable asset within your business. It defines who you are, what you do and how customers perceive you. Without it, you may as well be out of business.

If you value it highly, so do today's tech-savvy criminals. They're already using the interconnected, online economy to put brands - including yours - at risk. From domain hijacking and phishing to URL redirection and identity theft, no brand is safe.

But protecting against these threats is more involved than putting a virtual lock on your Web presence. You could study the latest best practices in brand protection, but the fast moving nature of today's threat environment means your knowledge might be out of date before you even get started. You need to decide whether or not it makes sense to do it yourself or bring in a third party expert.

Flying solo may not be in your best interest because it can:

• Divert resources away from organizational core competencies

• Increase the potential to miss emerging types of threats

• Result in breached regulatory compliance standards

• Drive up IT and organizational costs

Because of the shifting threat landscape, external assistance is increasingly viable for businesses struggling to understand the risks and the protective strategies they must employ.

Because brand protection is all they do, third party specialists can leverage their experience across a broader range of clients. Economies of scale in brand protection are critical given the complex tools and processes - such as massive databases and analytical software - that must be evolved and deployed.

Scanning the online landscape, identifying emerging threats and building protective measures against them is a resource intensive process beyond the capabilities of most average businesses. Organizations that choose to insource this effort often rely on processes cobbled together by internal work teams whose members typically lack the skills needed to implement best of breed solutions.

This can result in expensive, inefficient and inadequate solutions. Because even one successful attack can permanently compromise the company's brand, it's clear that unless the core competencies are already well established, most organizations would do well to look outside for assistance.

In doing so, look for the following key capabilities in a provider:

• A client list with representation from across organizations with similar needs and willing to provide references

• Ability to partner in dealing broadly with online issues, including those associated with identity theft, IP abuses (including image and logo rights) and defamatory discussions

• Use of human analysis - and not a data dump - to complement technology in providing data refined to meet specific client needs

At first glance, using existing staff to protect your brand may look like the most cost effective solution. But don't underestimate the cost and complexity of going it alone. In most cases, outsourcing is a company's only brand protection alternative.

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