The cybersecurity threat landscape is growing as fast as the skills gap. When combined the two are creating a perfect storm of opportunities for bad actors and security experts alike — and networking giants Google and Microsoft are going head-to-head to move quickly into the security services market.

As Google is working out the details of its Mandiant acquisition, Microsoft is moving quickly to fill the skills gap by expanding into a new “human-led” offering called Microsoft Security Experts.

The company sees a need for the service. In fact, last year, "Microsoft Security blocked over 9.6 billion malware threats and more than 35.7 billion phishing and other malicious emails. Microsoft Security is actively tracking more than 35 ransomware families and 250 unique threat actors across observed nation-state, ransomware, and criminal activities, and the company’s technology blocks more than 900 brute force password theft attempts every second," according to a corporate blog on the new service.

When it comes to fighting threats, “technology is critical, but it’s the combination of leading technologies, comprehensive threat intelligence, and highly skilled people that makes for a truly effective security posture,” Vasu Jakkal, corporate VP of security, compliance, identity, and management at Microsoft noted in a corporate blog.

These experts aim to help stretched enterprises tackle everything from security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy. The services will include three new managed services created with input from its partner ecosystem: Defender Experts for Hunting, Defender Experts for XDR, and Security Services for Enterprise.

In tandem with the new services, the networking giant also announced it was making an incremental multimillion-dollar financial investment this coming year in its managed XDR partner community.

“Gartner predicts that 50 percent of organizations will be using managed detection and response (MDR) services to contain threats by 2025, We want to invite all our managed detection and response partners to expand their offerings to help meet the critical customer need for managed detection and response services that go beyond the endpoint,” wrote Jakkal.

“It’s getting harder every day for organizations to build and maintain a full security team, let alone one with the ever-expanding skillset required to meet the range of today’s security demands,” he noted.