Today’s threat landscape is more challenging than ever, and cyber criminals are growing increasingly sophisticated. As a result, organizations must adopt newer and more effective measures to protect their digital assets from attack. Organizations can achieve this by implementing automated security solutions in their cybersecurity strategy.
What is automation in cybersecurity?
Automation is the process of executing tasks or actions on an automated system with minimal or no human intervention. In other words, automation simplifies your organization’s security operations by reducing the amount of manual work performed by security professionals.
Security automation is the use of software to monitor, detect, and respond to security events or threats. It is one of the three main pillars of effective cyber defense. The other two pillars are security awareness and incident response.
Types of cybersecurity implementation
Malicious attacks are escalating every day, so it is more important than ever to be proactive about identifying any weaknesses and potential threats to your organization’s network and data. One of the most efficient and effective ways to do this is through automation of cybersecurity solutions.
There are a number of cybersecurity tools that are automated, including:
- Security automation and orchestration and response (SOAR) solutions, such as Microsoft Sentinel. SOAR tools are a stack of security tools that collect data about security threats and respond to security incidents
- Robotic process automation (RPA) that scan for vulnerabilities, monitoring tools,
- Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions gather data from across the security environment, including endpoints, networks, and cloud environments, and more.
While each tool operates in different ways, the process followed by automated security systems is fairly typical:
- Threat detection, receive alerts, correlate them with other data or threat intelligence, decide if an alert is genuine
- Determine response action, based on what type of security event is occurring, and choosing the most appropriate action from the automation playbook
- Contain and eradicate the security threat, by performing automatic processes to ensure the threat doesn’t spread or cause more damage, and ideally eradicate it from affected systems.
- Close the ticket or escalate the alert, depending on set rules to understand if the automated actions were successful in mitigating the threat, or if there is a need for further activity. If further action isn’t required, automation can close the ticket and provide a comprehensive report of the threat and activities performed.
In some or many cases, automated security tools will only perform one or more of these steps, and then a human security analyst will take over the other steps in the process.
Benefits of automation in cybersecurity
Security automation can help organizations mitigate cybersecurity risks, detect cyber threats, reduce false positives, and enhance resilience to cyber risk. It can also improve your organization’s productivity, efficiency, and ROI. As outlined below, there are several benefits of automation in cybersecurity.
- Efficiency - Automated security tools reduce the time spent on manual tasks and improve end-to-end process management. Faster response time from detecting to dealing with threats reduces the impact of cybersecurity events.
- Ease of use - Automated security tools are easy to deploy and operate. They can also be customized according to your organization’s requirements. Cybersecurity automation lets security analysts organize all data to more clearly identify threats and also the actions needed.
- Scale - as the threat landscape changes, businesses can easily scale up or down their security solution based on organizational needs.
- Reduced false positives - Automated security tools can process data more rapidly than humans, with far less risk of false positives, which offers consistent detection accuracy.
- Improved security posture- Automated security tools ensure that your organization will be resilient to cyber risk, through enhanced analytical capabilities and decision making. This improves detection and prevention, overall increasing your organization’s security posture.
- Improved resource utilization - Automated security tools can be programmed to handle critical tasks, freeing up your security team’s resources. It is almost impossible for security teams to manage the volumes of data needed to analyze security threats and then act on them. Automation allows security teams to focus on proactively preventing security issues.
Protect your business technology with the experts
Automation is the key to better security on all fronts – speed, accuracy, consistency and ease of use are all benefits of automation when it comes to cybersecurity. You can implement different types of automation to streamline security operations and achieve optimal results. It’s important to choose the right tools and technologies to implement automation in your cybersecurity strategy. The cybersecurity experts at Aquarius IQ can ensure your critical business data is always safe in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape.
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