As growing number of cyber threats fueled by new attack vectors, security automation has become a top concern for many organizations with some of them against it. Read on to know more about it…
Many organizations are opting for security automation as they deal with an increasing number of cyber threats fueled by new attack vectors in the cloud, endpoint, and networks. Organizations are realizing that automation is a way to decrease risks, gain greater visibility into their networks, and get the most out of their security stacks, therefore it’s moving up the priority list.
Human error is one of the most significant risks that automation can resolve. When an security professional is asked to do the same task every day, hunting for security threats in the large network, they are bound to make a mistake at some point of time. This is something that computers will be able to perform because once they’ve been assigned a task, they’ll complete it flawlessly every time. Processes that are automated and orchestrated can also help to reduce risks by allowing security risks to be detected and addressed more quickly.
Security Automation
At all stages of security, there is now an opportunity to apply automation to reduce risk. Automated policy orchestration helps to decrease risk by ensuring that security policies are in place and effective, lowering the risks of systems and data being compromised.
Automated scanning for vulnerabilities, flaws, malware, and configuration errors can be the first step, followed by automated profiling of allocation behaviour for whitelisting and anomaly detection. Detection and reaction to breaches and threats are two more security domains that are suitable for automation.
Security automation allows security teams to automate time-consuming and repetitive processes with the purpose of enhancing SecOps workflow and increasing productivity. Security automation, enabled by Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) technology gives Security Operation Centers (SOCs) a significant boost in SecOps, resulting in higher SOC productivity and an significant reduction in incident response time.
SOAR technology enables businesses to turn their security operational processes into a workflow and orchestrate various existing technologies to better detect, track, and mitigate cyber incidents. Analysts have a plethora of jobs and processes to do, and automation allows them to choose which repetitive operations they want to automate and which they want to process manually.
SOAR Dependent on Humans
Security automation will not be able to replace humans and take their jobs because, no matter how advanced it becomes, it will always be dependent on humans. The nice part of cybersecurity automation is that it’s entirely customizable and always under the watchful eye of security professionals.
The reality is that, no matter how advanced security automation is in terms of autonomy, it still requires human guidance and navigation. Even though automation can manage tasks on its own, it must be trained.
With a SOAR solution, analysts can replicate threat response processes and determine which functions should be automated and which should not. The automation process requires human intervention and control to be optimized and tailored to the manner the organizations wants the automation process to be controlled.
Security automation automates numerous manual and repetitive tasks, allowing analysts to focus on user decisions and other critical tasks that must be performed by humans. Analysts have access to their own SecOps Dashboard, which allows them to manage all of their tasks. SOAR gives analysts the freedom to select which operations they want to automate. Analysts can also automate a wide range of security operations because to SOAR’s noteworthy versatility.
The Road Ahead
Regardless of the reservations on security automation, one thing is certain that it is here to stay. Even more so now that hackers are beginning to bolster their cyberattacks with automation powered by Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. This indicates that SOCs who haven’t adopted automation yet are running out of time, and automation will become a mandatory capability in everyday SecOps sooner or later.