To overcome the challenges created by limited security personnel and increasing security risks, enterprises need to adopt an automated detection, protection, and response strategy.
Cyber security threats have become extremely sophisticated. Today, even with a full staff of trained cybersecurity professionals, the time to compromise has become so short that human intervention is no longer a practical security strategy.
The coronavirus crisis is not slowing down the cyber adversaries; in fact, it’s the other way around. Security attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and getting more aggressive with employees adapting to new methods of working.
Security teams face an ever-growing volume of security event data are unable to keep up with these new security challenges, while resources mostly remain static. Choosing automation instead, can help better manage this monumental shift.
Despite the benefits of security automation, very few organizations leverage the capabilities to their full potential, and those who do often deploy them partially. Organizations still rely heavily on manual processes.
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This makes detecting, preventing, containing, and responding to cyber threats more difficult. The challenges that enterprises without automation face extend beyond technical capabilities; they negatively affect risk management and employee morale.
The Importance of Security Automation
Greater levels of automation can increase cyber resilience through consistent response times and actions. It can help security teams establish response time steps and accelerate effectiveness by enabling them to scale up their efforts to meet the demands of an increasing number of events.
Moreover, as automation capabilities mature, a feedback loop allows continuous process improvement through root cause analysis and updates.
Automation decreases the possibility of human error. Manual work always involves a slight chance of human error, resulting in inaccurate data. With the help of automation, organizations can greatly reduce the chances of error as the same rules and procedures are followed each time.
With automation, organizations can allow their analysts to spend more time on deeper analysis and more strategic involvement in the security procedures, yielding increased results on automation investments.
Adopting Automation
Policies, standards, and procedures must be in place for proper execution. Instead of buying additional unnecessary tools, enterprises should take inventory of existing tools for process flows. Gathering infrastructure configuration also helps identify whether policies are being adhered to.
Organizations cannot set and forget automation. Security teams must periodically conduct smoke tests to compare expectations with actual results. Also, if changes are made without consulting the parties involved, service quality and customer experience could be at severe risk.
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It’s no longer enough for organizations to only have clear visibility and quick determination of potential security gaps – enforcement of desired policy is needed to reduce risk and scale security across the business.
The Risks of Automation
Automating insufficient practices and processes can make things worse. Also, moving to an automated process can expose hidden fears of automation that may exist in an organization.
A security program relying solely on automation can create an irreversible error. Automation is continuously changing, and it needs capable humans to help counter innovative intruders.
Automation can also incur false positives, and this can be detrimental to business operations. Organizations need to ensure each area of automation is working the way it is intended.
There also needs to be robust exceptions showing how each business application works, or else the security automation workflows could block required business applications. There needs to be a system that can ingest, review, take proper action, and then document them.
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Security automation needs to be considered a crucial must-have in the current threat landscape. Many issues arising from a cyber-security talent shortage, operational costs, and alert fatigue can be countered with efficiently and intelligently used security automation. It also helps meet the compliance requirements during times of unusual change.
