Security automation enables you to automate and streamline security processes for greater efficiency and scalability, freeing up staff to focus on high-priority investigations and decreasing alert fatigue risk.
Making use of security automation tools successfully requires having a set of detailed processes in place, with an action plan outlining all information, steps and potential conflicts related to each task.
What is Security Automation?
Security automation refers to the integration of software solutions into cybersecurity operations to enhance detection, response, and remediation efforts. By automatically responding to trigger events faster and minimizing human error, security automation helps streamline incident response times while speeding up incident resolution times and speeding incident response times overall.
Automated security tools make the work of cybersecurity teams much simpler by taking over routine, repetitive security tasks that lead to burnout. Furthermore, these automated tools decrease time spent manually correlating and analyzing data, speeding projects along and improving overall SOC efficiency.
Rising cyber threats require an agile and proactive response that leverages security automation technology as part of an overall zero-trust security framework that meets current and emerging threat landscape demands.
Alerting management quickly of security incidents is essential to avoiding data breaches that lead to costly fines, remediation costs and reputational harm. With an advanced security automation platform you can connect all your systems, tools and processes so they work in tandem to automate threat detection, response, and remediation workflows seamlessly.
Why automate security processes?
Security automation aims to minimize response times for alerts, increasing agility and decreasing cyberattack impact while protecting data breaches.
Security teams often struggle with managing an increasing volume of alerts. Security automation offers teams an effective solution for handling more alerts without compromising productivity or quality.
Automating security processes also enables teams to focus on more pressing security concerns, freeing security analysts and engineers up for more important work such as threat hunting, forensic investigations and other essential duties.
Security automation can also simplify the use of various security tools that may otherwise be cumbersome and complex to operate, providing visibility into the overall ecosystem while allowing teams to prioritize efforts based on what they see most often in the system. Furthermore, automation may improve compliance monitoring and reporting as well as enable quicker response times when responding to regulatory requirements.
What security processes can be automated?
Security automation tools streamline repetitive security operations, relieving human analysts from workload and risk. From vulnerability management and incident response through threat detection and compliance management – security automation offers organizations looking to streamline and simplify their cybersecurity processes many use cases that can benefit.
Fight Alert Fatigue and Burnout
Security automation tools can reduce analyst workload by prioritizing events based on pre-set criteria and automatically sending them to a system of record, which helps fight alert fatigue while improving analyst performance by enabling analysts to focus on the most urgent vulnerabilities first.
Automating security allows organisations to gain a holistic perspective of their security posture by linking disparate tools together, creating one source of truth for them all, and helping to identify open ports, software in use and more – something vitally needed by DevOps teams so they can quickly detect and address emerging threats as soon as they arise.
Threat hunting
Cyber security automation is essential to keeping up with attackers, yet prioritizing use cases that provide maximum value will ensure a strong return on investment.
Threat hunting is the practice of manually or machine-assisted investigation to detect security incidents missed by automated detection systems, especially advanced attacks which use covert techniques and exploit vulnerabilities to bypass intrusion detection systems. This technique can be especially valuable in uncovering attacks which use stealthy techniques and exploit vulnerabilities to evade detection systems.
Threat hunters require accurate data and context in order to detect suspicious activities that warrant further investigation. A security automation system can help reduce false positives, freeing up resources for real threats that require immediate attention.
To support threat hunting, security automation systems must have the capacity to collect granular system events and logs from multiple sources, while correlating this data with threat intelligence and external information sources to identify patterns of attack and create an effective detection process.
Security incident response
Security automation tools facilitate faster, more effective incident response. This decreases response times from initial threat detection to its resolution – thus lessening cyberattack impacts and decreasing their resulting damages.
Security teams may become overwhelmed by the volume of alerts they receive. By automating some processes, false positives may be reduced and your team can focus on more urgent concerns instead of false alarms.
UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics): Utilizing machine learning algorithms and automation, User and Entity Behavior Analytics is used to detect suspicious user or device activity and prioritize its importance. A critical element of advanced cybersecurity capabilities, SIEM solutions include EDR/XDR features with this capability as standard features.
Remediation: Responding to security breaches can be a lengthy and complex process, but automation makes the task simpler by streamlining updates and applying remediation across an organization’s platform, applications, and tools that protect from attacks – including patching vulnerabilities, installing firewalls/endpoint protection/ticketing systems/ticket management platforms/tools etc. Automation saves SOC analysts time while increasing accuracy with security updates.
Endpoint protection
Endpoint protection is an absolute necessity in today’s connected world, as unprotected endpoints can provide cybercriminals with an avenue for data theft, corporate espionage or cyber extortion, brand damage and more.
Modern endpoint protection solutions typically utilize machine learning and automation capabilities to increase detection capabilities and decrease response times, while taking advantage of cloud technology to increase scalability, speed, accuracy while decreasing hardware footprints – freeing IT staff members up for other security-related duties.
Organizations often struggle to stay abreast of the rapidly shifting cyber threat landscape. Automated threat detection and response solutions offer organizations a much-needed safeguard, monitoring networks 24/7 and alerting security teams immediately when potential attacks emerge so that they can act swiftly to mitigate losses from attacks.
Types of Security Automation Tools
Security automation tools serve a multitude of purposes, from detecting cyber threats to streamlining workflows and increasing visibility into their entire digital estate – all while alleviating internal security experts from carrying out these functions manually.
Automating security tasks allows organizations to free up time and resources to focus on more pressing matters while eliminating the need for additional staffing costs.
Automated detection systems can significantly decrease incident response times by providing swift, automatic responses to common attack vectors such as phishing, ransomware and botnets – helping companies avoid expensive data breaches, fines and remediation costs.
Security automation makes compliance with cybersecurity regulations and industry standards simpler, as no-code security automation platforms allow IT professionals to create custom automation processes without needing specialized software development skills. This is especially helpful for teams lacking IT or engineering resources and expertise.
Robotic Process Automation RPA
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers security processes a way to be simplified and automated without disrupting IT systems. Software robots can be programmed to follow workflows and rules, helping reduce human errors in work that requires accuracy or compliance (like regulatory standards).
RPA tools help security processes by running them much more quickly than humans could ever manage on their own. A task that may have taken an individual hours can now be completed in minutes by software bots without compromising quality of outputs produced.
Automation can also ease the burden on existing security teams by freeing them up to focus on more complex or high-priority tasks and decreasing manual efforts. This reduces costs associated with hiring more staff in an industry where skilled professionals are scarce and improves overall team efficiency.
Automated tools can also help to provide round-the-clock protection by monitoring networks and systems continuously for potential threats, helping meet compliance requirements in highly regulated industries and ensuring security policies are consistently applied across an organization.
The Benefits of Security Automation
Security automation enables teams to standardize workflows without needing programming knowledge, thus decreasing manual processes and increasing productivity.
Security automation enables security teams to quickly respond to threats, reduce incident costs and enhance overall efficiency. Let’s explore its top advantages.
1. Faster threat detection
Security automation enables teams to quickly detect and respond to threats quickly, speeding up incident response times and improving response time for cyber attacks.
Security automation platforms enable cybersecurity teams to implement best practices more quickly, decreasing detection times and eliminating manual errors that might otherwise arise in the process. They also allow security teams to consolidate alerts from multiple security systems into one dashboard for easier prioritizing and triaging – while auto-closing non-malicious false positive alerts.
An overwhelming problem facing SOC teams today is the sheer volume of alerts received, most of which are false positives, leading to “alert fatigue.” Security professionals may miss critical alerts altogether or ignore them altogether – something which won’t improve your organisation’s security posture. Security automation offers one way to address this by centralizing alert handling into one manageable queue while enriching them with threat intelligence from malware detonation sandboxes or similar sources.
2. Faster containment and mitigation
Security automation makes the job of security professionals much simpler by freeing them up from mundane, repetitive tasks that eat away at their time and prevent higher priority threats from being addressed. Furthermore, automation reduces dwell times and false positives – helping organizations manage zero trust security posture more easily. It can lead to increased productivity and morale across teams within an organization as a result.
Automating some processes also assists organizations with meeting compliance standards and industry regulations. By using a secure automation platform such as Blink, workflows can be created that automatically maintain user permissions – flagging any need to deprovision users or change access roles when needed.
Before implementing security automation, it is critical to assess what processes could most benefit from automation, as well as how best to roll out any new systems. Transitions must also be managed smoothly between humans and machines in order to ensure both are capable of carrying out effective tasks; otherwise automated systems could substitute human insight or rational judgment calls that they cannot correlate.
3. Improved productivity
While some security employees may view automation as a threat to their jobs, automation actually helps increase productivity by freeing up time for more complex tasks and investigations. Automation also minimizes costs related to additional staff or external security consultants that would otherwise need to be hired as the result of inefficiency.
Security automation also helps employees by relieving them of tedious, repetitive tasks that lead to burnout and turnover. By giving employees more exciting work that keeps them productive and engaged at work, security automation allows employees to remain productive, engaged, and happier at their jobs.
Security automation can eliminate silos by consolidating data from disparate systems into one platform or dashboard, making it easier to prioritize and manage multiple alerts and threat intelligence. This makes SOC analysts’ job faster and simpler when investigating incidents like phishing attacks or other related incidents; however, human insight remains necessary for tasks which require reasoning beyond what machines can interpret; these tasks include password failure alerts or deciphering user permissions.
4. Standardization of security processes
As more companies embrace security automation, it becomes imperative that they implement standard data formats, protocols, and APIs that facilitate interoperability, consistency, and efficiency among systems. This facilitates efficient data and alert management across multiple tools while decreasing manual effort required.
Security automation can also streamline reporting and compliance activities for your organization, making them more consistent across industries with highly regulated standards and regulations. This is particularly advantageous in highly regulated fields.
Security orchestration and response (SOAR) platforms that offer comprehensive threat intelligence feeds provide contextual data that enables analysts to prioritise and automate alert handling, greatly shortening investigation times for security incidents and helping eliminate trial-and-error analysis of textual threat alerts – this makes a real difference when SOC analysts are already overburdened with alerts they cannot adequately investigate individually.
Security incident response
Automating manual tasks makes it easier for cybersecurity teams to respond rapidly when threats are identified. Automation tools can handle many of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks performed by SOC analysts so they have more time for more complex incidents.
SOC analysts often find themselves overwhelmed with alerts and unable to investigate every incident in order to detect threats. By automating responses for specific types of alerts, security automation enables analysts to reduce mean time to detect and respond times – vital elements in protecting organizations from breaches.
Security automation tools also make it easier for security teams to comply with compliance standards. Many regulations and laws mandate stringent cybersecurity controls that may be difficult for organizations with limited resources to implement effectively. Utilizing security automation, however, allows organizations to automate protections and meet all industry requirements without placing additional stress on their security teams or customers – helping businesses maintain certifications while showing they’re protecting customer data and personal information.
Security Orchestration Automation and Response
Utilizing security automation to monitor and detect cyber threats helps keep attackers off guard, while simultaneously allowing security teams to respond more rapidly and efficiently.
An SIEM platform, for instance, can automate and accelerate data gathering and analysis by integrating into optimized threat response workflows – which reduces mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to triage (MTTR), leading to faster triage times.
Automation can help SOC analysts fight alert fatigue and burnout by filtering out low priority or false positive notifications; analysts can then focus on high-priority issues while increasing productivity.
SOCs can use security automation to streamline and standardize their processes, increasing both consistency and efficiency. This enables SOCs to more easily comply with regulatory requirements while saving costs associated with breaches, as well as to eliminate human error that might otherwise lead to security incidents that compromise business operations or disrupt operations. Security automation also reduces burden on cybersecurity professionals while strengthening defenses against cyberattacks.
Types of Security Automation Tools
IT teams can leverage security automation tools to reduce complexity and increase visibility across all their systems. From security information and event management (SIEM), threat detection and response systems and orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms – IT teams can use security automation tools to consolidate and integrate various solutions, streamline operations, automate workflows and enable seamless collaboration with teams such as IT or DevOps.
An attack can have devastating repercussions for businesses of all kinds–from financial losses to customer trust loss–so it comes as no surprise that security teams are constantly searching for ways to boost productivity and efficiency. Though adopting new technology requires an upfront investment of time and resources, security automation platforms offer huge returns.
Determining whether your organization is ready for security automation ultimately hinges on its use cases. Common uses for security automation platforms include phishing threat detection and alert triage; however, they also offer capabilities such as incident response, compliance reporting and legal/governance use cases.
XDR
XDR integrates threat detection and response capabilities into one solution, empowering security teams to rapidly identify and mitigate threats using automated playbooks. This approach reduces response times for organizations as they see faster returns on their cybersecurity investments.
XDR goes beyond traditional solutions in that it collects data from across an entire IT ecosystem, including networks, cloud environments and applications. It then analyzes this information to provide context for attacks by identifying what appears suspicious – giving security teams more power against sophisticated multistage threats and breaches.
Security automation tools can assist in eliminating manual errors that arise throughout daily operations, including misconfigured resources, inconsistent policy application and unchecked user access. This improves operational consistency while decreasing risks such as cyber attacks, regulatory fines and reputational harm.
Security Automation – A Typical Security Automation Process
Security automation involves using technology to streamline processes and decrease human errors. Furthermore, automation frees security staff up from repetitive or time-consuming tasks so they can focus on more strategic and high-value work.
First, identify what tasks need to be automated – start with those most frequent and highest-value use cases as a place to begin.
A Typical Security Automation Process
Security automation refers to machine actions designed to monitor, detect and combat cyberthreats. They identify threats in seconds – much faster than human security teams can respond – and devise the best response plans accordingly.
Data generated by security sensors is fed into a central SIEM, where it is then combined with threat intelligence and other sources to enable security teams to quickly take action in response to detected events, including changing access policy rules, quarantining devices/users or updating indicators of compromise.
Automation allows security analysts to focus on the most critical issues without being distracted by false positives, thus reducing analyst burnout and turnover while increasing productivity and helping organizations deliver more value.
1. Emulating investigative steps of human security
Security automation refers to a set of tools used to monitor, detect, troubleshoot and address cyberthreats without human involvement. Security automation quickly identifies threats before prioritizing them for resolution in a fraction of the time it would take a security engineer manually.
Security teams can then devote themselves to more productive tasks like app vulnerability scanning, phishing investigation and threat hunting – helping businesses reach their business goals of expanding operations while operating more efficiently and reducing inefficiencies.
To maximize the benefits of security automation, it is crucial to create a clear use case and understand its intended role within your organization. Once that has been decided upon, find an easy-to-deploy and build upon solution with minimal coding needed – no-code tools with intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces allow you to rapidly deploy automated processes that solve common security issues such as SIEM alert enrichment and phishing detection quickly and effortlessly.
2. Determining responsive action
Automation and orchestration enable security analysts to devote more of their attention and time towards complex threats as well as long-term safeguards, rather than constantly switching systems in search of intelligence gathering.
Six out of ten IT professionals experience alert fatigue, meaning they become overwhelmed by false or repeated alerts that are difficult to respond to promptly enough in order to mitigate risks. Automation provides relief by clearing away these nuisances so teams can focus on more important work like updating documentation, implementing security protocols or conducting threat hunts.
Make sure that the solution you select is intuitive, requires no coding and can connect all of the tools that form part of your incident response processes into an integrated platform. Only then will siloed data become redundant and all processes can come together into one streamlined workflow.
3. Containment and eradication
Traditional security operations centers require analysts to manually comb through threats manually, which is time consuming, subject to alert fatigue and can result in false positives that can distract analysts and delay real breaches from being addressed. Security automation helps the team by clearing away minor alerts so analysts can focus on responding to more pressing threats.
Once a threat is identified during investigation, it must be contained and eradicated from your environment. This process involves uninstalling or wiping systems, reimaging machines, and applying patches to address vulnerabilities the threat may have exploited.
Adopting a measured approach to security automation enables you to test out new workflows without impacting business operations. Starting by setting priorities and outlining use cases will give your new playbooks the best start possible, and reduces the risk of tools or processes not fitting with your security posture or goals.
4. Close the ticket or escalate
Step one in implementing security automation for your company should be to assess what processes will best serve it. This decision should take into account your goals for operating more efficiently or decreasing inefficiencies as well as which data and systems require the greatest protection. It is also essential to prioritize use cases while researching vendors that enable playbook creation without extensive coding.
An effective escalation workflow is key to any SOC’s success, allowing employees to quickly resolve tickets and close them or escalate incidents as necessary to higher-level employees. This ensures tickets do not remain open, which could result in additional incidents or breaches; additionally, this approach helps decrease employee turnover by eliminating monotonous tasks that are repetitive in nature.
Security automation enables SOC teams to focus on more challenging work while increasing overall productivity. Security automation reduces human errors while protecting analysts from being overburdened with false alerts causing alert fatigue, leading them to miss real threats altogether.
Final Thoughts
Security automation is one of the best ways to maximize a limited pool of human security professionals, helping teams focus their energies on what matters most, such as detecting ransomware, phishing scams and cryptojacking attacks.
Before deploying automation tools, it is crucial that you first determine your goals and prioritize those use cases which offer the highest return on investment. Furthermore, be sure to provide training for your team as well as set clear guidelines as to when hands-off systems should be utilized and when humans should remain involved.
Search for an automation playbook solution without needing code as this will allow you to avoid the time and cost involved with coding and implementation challenges that slow deployment, while giving your business the flexibility of adapting your workflows as needs change. A no-code approach may prove especially valuable in SOCs with limited developer resources.