Strategies to Automate Security Processes

Strategies to Automate Security Processes-01

No two businesses are alike, and each will have to adopt automation in its own unique way. Instead of thinking of technology as a means to an end, it’s critical to take a holistic approach to processes and people in order to get the most out of automation.

IT security is more complex than ever before, with more platforms to support, changes to manage, and vulnerabilities to fix. This is made worse by the fact that there are a million unfilled security positions around the world.

As a result, IT security teams want to use automation to more effectively deal with these issues. Instead of focusing on manual activities like data preparation, automation can help teams focus on making the most of their abilities. However, in order to be successful over time, IT leaders should approach automation in the right way.

Following are a few actions that IT leaders should take to automate their security operations.

Auditing

The first step is to conduct a process audit. This should be a simple task, but it may reveal any adjustments or shortcuts that the team has implemented in order to become more efficient. These can be double-checked before being kept or destroyed. This gives IT leaders the chance to start enforcing best practices right now. It also provides an opportunity to check in with the team and ensure that they are comfortable with the approach before the project begins.

Also Read: Five Strategies for Increasing Cybersecurity Effectiveness

Determine the most appropriate procedure

The second stage is to identify the appropriate processes with which to begin automating. Instead of attempting to cover everything at once, IT leaders should focus on a few key processes that the team must complete. There are already a number of solid automation resources available to assist them in getting started, such as packages of integrations and processes that IT leaders can tweak to match their needs and then execute. Processes around phishing attempts, incident response for critical programs, and detecting misconfigurations are all good examples.

Employees should be supported

The third stage is to consider how enhanced analytics and integrations can help staff. This entails investigating how the security operations center employs its security incident and event management (SIEM) system to collect data from around the organization and deliver automated results to staff. This should be part of IT leaders’ overall playbook, and the SIEM can assist them in automating the data analysis side.

However, since there may be hundreds or even thousands of alerts coming in, there are additional processes to assist analysts in working with the information. To help the team be more productive with this data, security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) can be used to automate the process of taking these analytics results through the incident response process.

Also Read: As Cyber Threats Rise, Cloud Security Must be a Team Effort

Examine the data

The fourth stage is to examine metrics to see how effective the automation initiatives are. Comparing procedures before and after automation to see how much time is saved is a good place to start. This can assist IT leaders in demonstrating how much time their team is gaining back, as well as how this equates to cost savings and the prevention of attacks.

Consider automating as part of a process of continuous improvement

The final stage is to consider automation as part of a long-term process rather than a one-time project. Once those early automation initiatives are completed, IT management can look at other procedures that can be shifted overusing the lessons gained and eventually cover more edge cases. They may improve their strategy by fine-tuning their analytics, streamlining how they send work to analysts, and assisting their employees in becoming more productive over time.

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