Cybersecurity automation refers to the process of automating the prevention, detection, identification, and eradication of cyberthreats. It can be successful without human assistance, but it usually supplements the security operations center (SOC) team.
With persisting tough circumstances in the cyber world, how can security teams further enhance their ability to reduce data breaches despite today’s more complex attack surfaces? We will learn more about cyber security automation’s various challenges and benefits.
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How Cybersecurity Automation Works
Cybersecurity automation works by recognizing risks to an organization’s security posture, sorting and triaging them, assigning a priority level, and responding to each one. Security automation helps to streamline the numerous notifications that security professionals get regularly.
It uses technology to handle security activities with minimal human participation. Artificial intelligence (AI) performs repetitive tasks, such as prioritizing threats based on risk levels, compiling information for investigations, and responding to threats using predefined rules in seconds and with greater accuracy, speed, and efficiency than manual processes.
Benefits of Automation in Cybersecurity
The potential for a cyberattack, including the likelihood of downtime, increases directly with the time required to identify, investigate, and react to the attack. Effective cyberattack defense involves deploying automated systems capable of analyzing data in real time and providing a full picture of every activity occurring within an organization’s network.
In today’s cybersecurity landscape, timely detection and remediation of threats are important to reducing the damage of an attack.
Enhanced Security Capabilities
Using security automation to identify aberrant activity or signs of compromise leads to faster and more accurate threat detection.
Automation can reduce incident response time by allowing key teams, such as security teams in a Security Operations Center (SOC), to limit and remediate threats swiftly through predetermined actions. This reduces the likelihood that security breaches would escalate and shortens the meantime to react (MTTR).
Improved Performance & Posture
Misconfigurations may lead to performance difficulties, noncompliance, and vulnerabilities; thus, automating system configuration management and maintenance can assist. This ensures security policies are in place, upgrades are regularly implemented, and systems function properly.
Implementing cybersecurity automation can improve resilience and reduce alert fatigue, allowing IT, operations, security, and development teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than constantly responding to cyberthreats.
Reduced Security Costs
Security automation may help you optimize your security resources and operating costs by removing repetitive security duties, optimizing workflows, and decreasing the need for specialist personnel. Cybersecurity automation can also assist you in preventing losing sensitive data, reputation, or other financial assets due to security breaches.
Simplified Security Compliance & Auditing
Organizations may use security automation to handle compliance with numerous security rules and standards, including GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST. Automation allows you to audit your security operations and provide reports indicating compliance status. You may also utilize automation to provide notifications about any gaps or possible breaches, lowering the risk of non-compliance fees or legal consequences.
Better Endpoint Management
Real-time awareness and safeguarding endpoints are also important in developing good cyber hygiene and strengthening cyber defense. Endpoints are “the doors and windows” of a network; without the proper security measures, they may allow threat actors to penetrate your environment. Cybersecurity automation streamlines the process of upgrading, monitoring, and fixing vulnerabilities, making it easier for enterprises to strengthen endpoint security.
This involves ensuring all endpoints meet security needs and rules and get the most recent updates. With total visibility and control over all endpoint devices connecting with your network, you can proactively safeguard your devices before an issue occurs and respond rapidly to discovered threats.
Challenges of Automation in Cybersecurity
As new threats emerge, companies discover that many old, manual cyber security methods are obsolete and ineffective. Organizations are encountering issues relating to old security systems and manual methods. These difficulties fall into three categories.
Time-Consuming & Error-Prone Security Processes
Security teams, particularly those facing a cybersecurity skills shortage, may struggle to keep up with the complexity of modern threats. Outdated and manual security procedures can lead to many unactionable warnings and the need to manually piece together fragmented cybersecurity information from diverse point products to acquire insights.
Manual tasks, on the other hand, can result in false positives, in which teams perceive and spend time tracking down a threat when there isn’t one, as well as false negatives, in which the opportunity to prevent or stop an attack early in its lifecycle is lost due to insufficient timing, insufficient analysis, or the use of limited, inaccurate data.
Reduced Visibility, Increased Risks & Costs
Many conventional security technologies function in silos, resulting in tool redundancy, conflicts, and workflow inefficiencies in security operations. For example, technologies may employ disparate data formats, sources, protocols, or standards, making data sharing and correlation problematic.
This can also result in teams operating off various dashboards with contradicting data, limiting their ability to refer to a single source of truth about the security state and dangers throughout the enterprise. Tool overlap not only raises maintenance and budget expenses but may also result in discrepancies in security posture, reducing agility and scalability, which are critical in today’s cybersecurity environment.
Compliance Management
Organizations handling personal, health, financial, or government data must adhere to various rules. As laws and industry standards evolve, compliance obligations may shift over time. These modifications necessitate ongoing monitoring and assessment of your compliance status to ensure that you have the proper procedures and documentation.
Learn more about the various network security threats and the effective defenses you can use to help protect your systems.
Helpful Cybersecurity Automation Tools
To maximize the benefits of automation in cybersecurity, it is crucial to be familiar with the tools, technologies, and frameworks that underpin most automation initiatives. This knowledge will help you choose the technique most suited to your company’s objectives. Some common approaches to automation are:
- Security Information & Event Management (SIEM): Investing in SIEM solutions helps organizations comply with local and federal regulations, study log data for incident response after data breaches and cyberattacks, and improve visibility across their organization’s environments. SIEM solutions gain insight into an organization’s IT landscape by collecting and analyzing log and event data generated by various devices, applications, networks, and infrastructure.
- Security Orchestration, Automation, & Response (SOAR): Organizations may simplify their security operations in three main areas with the help of SOAR software: threat management, security incident response, and security operations automation. Businesses with many security systems and regular occurrences often utilize SOAR technologies. These security systems may automate incident response operations using predefined playbooks and operate in the background without human intervention.
- Vulnerability Management Tools: To aid businesses in finding, categorizing, prioritizing, and fixing security holes, vulnerability management solutions can conduct automated scans of IT resources. To counteract cyberattacks on the network in real time, vulnerability management systems take a different approach to security than firewalls, antivirus, and anti-malware software.
- Endpoint Protection Tools: Protecting a company’s network connections, personal computers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, cloud-based apps, and services from cybercriminals, malware, and ransomware is the job of an endpoint security solution. Software for managing mobile devices (MDM), detecting and responding to endpoint threats (EDR), and preventing data loss (DLP) are some of the most common types of endpoint security solutions.
Find out more about other top security orchestration, automation, and response tools in this helpful guide.
Cybersecurity Automation Best Practices
There are several methods to derive benefits from security automation, such as setting objectives for its use, creating playbooks, and educating employees. Follow these recommended practices to maximize the value of your security automation investment:
Automation Cannot Replace People
The technology is effective for completing tasks, but professional security analysts are still required for more complicated situations requiring decision-making and sophisticated problem-solving. Automation will allow analysts to focus on the most important problems.
Establish Priorities
To get the most out of security automation, you must assess your cybersecurity posture and identify the areas requiring the most attention. When you have defined priorities, you can define your use cases and uncover security and workflow automation possibilities. Ensure to include everyone in your organization who is interested in your organization’s security.
While forming a bigger working group may hinder your progress, it will assist in assuring buy-in, saving you time later. Furthermore, the work you perform today to create priorities will be highly beneficial when developing playbooks.
Gradually Adopt Automation
Most firms cannot, and should not, automate everything simultaneously. As with any pilot project, you should quickly begin automating where it will add the greatest value and let you verify matching use cases internally. Adopting automation gradually allows you to analyze its effects and monitor its efficacy, allowing for any required tweaks.
Create Playbooks
Document the actions you now take to handle issues and ensure that your workflows are as robust as possible before you begin automating them. You must apply all of your organizational expertise to automate your security response.
Extensively Train Your Staff
Your security personnel, from junior analysts to leadership, will need extensive training, mentoring, and familiarization as they migrate from manual to automated response. It will also be vital to clarify what the security automation solution can and cannot accomplish so that everyone understands where automated response capabilities end, and human duties begin.
Use Newly Available Time
Automation increases security teams’ productivity and allows them to accomplish more for the organization. Plan how your analysts will focus on value-added activities for the firm, such as thoroughly analyzing why you are always combating phishing attempts. Your team may also use the time to create a continuous improvement approach for designing, implementing, and improving automation logic.
Security Tools & Workflows Coordination
Adopting security orchestration with security automation allows you to coordinate complex security procedures across multi-cloud environments, enhances communication and cooperation, increases productivity, eliminates mistakes, and shortens reaction times.
Bottomline: Cybersecurity Automation Is Necessary to Stay Up With Quickly Rising Cyberthreats
Cybersecurity automation is essential in today’s complicated situations. With the increasing quantity and severity of possible risks and cyber assaults, it improves the work satisfaction and engagement of your finest security analysts by automating dull, repetitive duties.
Security automation enables you to cut incident investigation and response times substantially while being ahead of threats. Tasks normally take hours, if not days, and can be completed in seconds. This means you’ll be able to respond to attacks more quickly and better secure your consumers, all while protecting your company’s brand and profits.
