In today’s digital world, the only constant we can rely on is change. As the digital world evolves, those intent on leveraging modern technology for malicious purposes become more sophisticated in their attacks.
The incidence of cybercrime has risen swiftly in the last few years, as malicious actors switch to using automation technology. Organizations looking to protect their IT infrastructure must use the same tools to protect and defend their systems.
Cybersecurity automation is fast becoming a necessity for businesses now and into the future.
What is cybersecurity automation?
Numerous ways exist to ensure your IT infrastructure can detect and protect against cyber threats. Cyber-attacks are launched in varying ways, which increases the threat landscape of any business. Keeping ahead of these threats is becoming more challenging, which is where automation has become so invaluable.
While automation has been around for centuries, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning has fueled a new era of automation. This is largely due to their ability to do things humans can’t, such as analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, learn from experience, and react with speed.
Cybersecurity automation is the ability for machines to detect, investigate, and react to potential threats without human intervention.
Automation takes on the repetitive task of sifting through expanses of data and alerts, which takes humans hours but can be done in seconds by the automated tools. IT security analysts need to respond to threats quickly and efficiently, which is made easier with automation tools identifying and ranking alerts quickly. Security staff can then take appropriate actions for any potential vulnerabilities in the IT environment.
There is also security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) systems, which automates both responses and corrections to alerts and threats:
- Detects threats in the IT environment
- Triages any potential threats following instructions and parameters set by security analysts
- Investigates the threat and decides if it’s legitimate or false
- Determines what action to take in response (alert, contain, resolve).
Why is cybersecurity automation necessary?
The fallout of cyber-attack cannot be underestimated. Regardless of the size of an organization, the reputational and financial damage inflicted is substantial. Many attacks target sensitive information, personal data, stealing or deleting information, disrupting business workflow, freezing or disabling systems. Customers and stakeholders can be affected, leading to a lack of trust in the targeted organization, and regulatory fines may be issued.
The critical factors influencing security automation are time and speed. Every 39 seconds a cyber-attack is underway globally. Organizations often receive thousands or even millions of alerts every month.
Security operations teams are virtually swamped with huge numbers of alerts that need to be sorted from actual threats and false-positive alerts. With an expanding attack surface to manage, such as cloud infrastructure and mobile devices, event management for security teams is critical yet challenging.
Security incident response needs human intervention but many of these tasks can be automated, to allow security teams to navigate the vast amount of data more effectively. Automating this process allows teams to speed up incident response, save time, and improve the organization’s security position.
Signs an organization needs security automation
Security automation is an essential part of any organization’s security strategy. It can be difficult to find the time and resources to manually investigate every single incident. Plus, relying on human experts for all your security needs can be prohibitively expensive.
While most organizations can benefit from automated security, they’re more likely to need it if:
- A breach has already occurred. 64% of companies globally have experienced at least one cyber-attack recently.
- False positives are overwhelming security teams. Each alert needs to be investigated as real, even if it turns out to be false-positive. Almost 50% of staff will ignore alerts based on past false-positive experiences.
- Incident response times are lagging. Nearly 50% of security teams spend over 4 hours a day dealing with alerts.
Benefits of cyber security automation
Organizations shifting to security automation allow security teams to focus on the more complex and productive tasks that can only be done by humans. The automation tools do mundane, repetitive tasks, informing and enabling employees to work more critically and strategically on improving the company’s risk posture.
- Cost-effective: security teams can focus on critical tasks to avoid data breaches or cyber-attacks that cost organizations dearly.
- Efficient: automation improves the efficiency of the business workflow, reduces disruption, creates a less stressful workplace for security teams.
- Reduces human error: automation introduces artificial intelligence and robotic process automation, increasing analytic abilities, and efficiencies by dealing with the substantial number of alerts and data.
- Enhanced decision-making: security teams can use data from automated tasks to identify vulnerabilities that can be corrected strategically and rapidly, leading to a more secure IT environment.
Will cybersecurity automation be the future?
Cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated and increasingly frequent. To keep ahead of these attacks, security support analysts need to shift from being overwhelmed by manual and repetitive activities sifting through alerts and data, to focus on productive and problem-solving tasks. Automating time-consuming, tedious activities frees up time and energy for higher level creation and implementation of security solutions.
It’s clear any organization that hopes to avoid cyber-attacks in the future needs to consider implementing automated security as part of their overall security strategy. It’s never too late to improve your organization’s security profile – speak to the team at Technology Solutions for expert advice and security support.
Don’t even get me started on false positives. They take up so much time! This is probably the main reason security automation is needed in every organization. Just the time this will save plus energy and nerves…
I can’t understand why cybersecurity automation isn’t present in all companies? There are even some medium to larger companies that don’t have it in place and it makes no sense at all. This saves up time for the IT department so they can focus on keeping a close eye on the whole picture and spot deficiencies in the system and plan accordingly.