As we’ve touched on in the previous blog in our security architecture series, the cyber security skills gap has a pronounced effect on organisations of all kinds. With nearly half of all businesses lacking basic cyber security skills, even the strongest cyber defences can be undermined by poor scoping, deployment, or management.
Beyond the obvious protection risks, the cyber security skills gap can have a direct commercial impact. Misjudgements often lead to duplicated controls in some areas and gaps in others, driving up cost and complexity. It can also mean organisations fail to fully utilise security capabilities they are already paying for, including tools within the Microsoft security stack. The need is clear: an expert partner who can optimise your security architecture and build internal knowledge. That is what sets our approach to cyber defence apart.
Expertise that scales with you
Security needs are rarely identical from one month to the next. At a baseline, managing and maintaining basic defence and testing should be a regularly scheduled activity. But one-off engagements, such as preparing for audits, or ensuring a new application is truly secure by design ahead of release, can suddenly shoot up the priorities list, requiring a rapid response as a result.
That’s why we offer our expertise on a flexible basis, allowing our involvement in your wider security architecture to scale to meet your needs, ensuring you always have access to the cyber security skills you require, without having to recruit your own experts. This means our security architects are available whenever they’re needed, but in slower periods, your cyber budgets are preserved for critical projects.
Our Microsoft security expertise helps optimise costs in a different way, helping you capitalise on tools already included in your Microsoft 365 subscription to enhance your cyber defences. Across the key pillars of identity, devices, platforms, applications, and data, effective use of Microsoft security tools can help you develop a robust, in-depth cyber defence, without needing to stretch budgets to deploy new tools. This frees up existing cyber spend to be more effectively reallocated, ensuring a more efficient security architecture.
In turn, this helps guarantee long‑term resilience. As your organisation grows, our expertise steps up alongside it, ensuring your security architecture remains robust, efficient, and ready to meet new challenges.
Accelerating security with true collaboration
While bringing external support for your security architecture provides immediate expertise for key projects, developing internal cyber security skills is critical for long-term success. Our security teams help to build the capabilities of your teams, collaborating closely, mentoring staff, and sharing knowledge to ensure you have a reliable foundation of in-house expertise.
No two organisations are identical, and neither are their in-house teams. Whatever the most effective starting point for your business, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with internal stakeholders to develop robust governance frameworks, build secure-by-design infrastructures, and monitor for new threats. Finally, our commitment to testing adds real-world simulations to the mix, including penetration tests that probe for vulnerabilities and red team exercises that can orchestrate a multi-layered cyberattack to test your detection and response capabilities – all intended to improve internal skills, without any risk to your business.
Our security architects bring experience drawn from a wide range of industries and operating models. That perspective helps us recognise recurring challenges and apply proven approaches that accelerate security maturity. We use automation, intelligence, and tooling from the Microsoft security ecosystem and beyond to streamline operations. This delivers greater visibility, enables faster responses to threats, and allows your team to work smarter, not harder.
Our security architects are also backed up by teams of specialists, supporting our approach and giving your team access to an even wider pool of expertise.
By building confidence and capability within your own teams, we help create a culture of continuous improvement, where cyber defence becomes an integrated, everyday function rather than an isolated initiative. Whether engaged as a long-term partner or for one-off support, we help you close any cyber security skills gaps within your business.
Making security architecture work for you
A strong security architecture is not just a set of controls. It is an operating model – clear ownership, well-scoped technical decisions, and the right skills to keep pace as your risks, technology, and business priorities change. With Advania, you get security architects who can strengthen your Microsoft security posture, remove duplication, close gaps, and help your teams build lasting capability, so your cyber defence improves month after month.
To get started, contact our security architects to book an initial consultation and put top-level expertise behind your strategy.
