What is Security Automation?
Security automation is the automatic handling of security operations-related tasks. It is the process of executing these tasks, such as scanning for vulnerabilities, without human intervention.
OR
The use of automatic systems to detect and prevent cyber threats, while contributing to the overall threat intelligence of an organization in order to plan and defend against future attacks.
Do you really need security automation?
Yes, especially if your SecOps team is already equipped with the basics like SIEM, endpoint security systems, and security logs.
Security automation helps to solve for some of these problems today:
- Not enough security talent
- Alert fatigue
- Slow time to resolution
- Operational inefficiencies
Organizations now receive between 10,000 and 150,000 security alerts per day.
Inconsistent response processes and a failure to effectively integrate people, processes, and technology mean that your team is not protecting your organization to the best of its ability. This inconsistency can result in important alerts getting ignored or not investigated fast enough. Delayed investigations can lead to devastating data breaches, which may not be noticed until it is already too late.
Security Automation: The problem solving solution
Security automation helps your organization solve these problems. First, it can help you handle alerts from the vast range of potential attack vectors by quickly determining if threats are significant without employees having to check multiple systems and platforms. Second, automating some or all of the incident response process allows your team to focus on serious threats and ensure that your organization is protected.
80 to 90 percent of security response tasks can be automated.
Third, automating tedious and time-consuming tasks allows you to not only do more with your existing staff, it also allows your employees to actually use their training. Cybersecurity employees don’t want to spend their time mindlessly scrolling through alerts, they would rather spend time actually investigating threats. Fourth, security automation can lead to vastly improved response times. And last, automation allows you to regulate and improve your incident response processes and workflows. By using automation, your organization can finally address every alert and stay ahead of threats.
Respond to every alert when you utilize security automation.
Security Automation Rescues Teams from Repetitive & Tedious Work
The right time to bring in automation is when you experience one or all three of these:
- Manual, time-intensive processes that take up most of your team’s time
- Tools aren’t integrated well
- Little to no development resources to build integrations and automation
Security automation can handle tedious, manual processes for you, from detection all the way through response. This can:
- Decrease your time to resolution
- Reduce or eliminate human error and alert fatigue
- Optimize the ROI of your security investments
Security processes that we recommend teams automate are:
- Monitoring and detection
- Data enrichment
- Incident response
- User permissions
- Business continuity