The role of automation in cyber security is becoming an increasingly critical process globally. Read on to know more about it…
One of the hottest topics in cybersecurity is automation. Cybersecurity automation is slowly becoming a requirement, rather than a add-on process, as cyber threats evolve at a faster pace.
The major goal of automating mundane and repetitive tasks is to free up time for people to problem-solving activities. From a cybersecurity standpoint, enterprises can become more resilient to cyber-attacks by dedicating all resources to these problem-solving activities.
To hack organizations, the threat actors are increasingly relying on automation technologies. Given the current business and threat landscape, how can the InfoSec leaders and CISOs start to adopt automation to secure their organizations?
Adopting Cybersecurity Automation
To begin, determine what automation means in your organization. This is because you may not have the budget for the most advanced automation technologies and hence you must first determine what is a good fit for your firm. Instead, you can begin by taking inventory of the security tools you already have and determine the threat landscape of your organization. Begin with processes and inventory, then work on quick wins before putting together a business case. To get the required budget to adopt automation solutions to address security threats and mitigation, you’ll require use cases.
The first step in determining where automation resources can be used is to assess the enterprise’s cyber security maturity. Armed with this crucial information, the next step into automation is a minor-step, regardless of where the organization is on the maturity spectrum. Proof of Concept (PoC) with tools is critical element for approval of cybersecurity in automation. With a PoC, the cyber security team can demonstrate the need for an automation solution. If it is presented convincingly to the leadership and board, the requisite budget for automation tools can be approved without any hassles.
It’s important to accept automation — through this process, organizations can be able to keep up with the pace of change and the sheer volume of threats and threat actors that are emerging. Automate as much of the incident response process as you can, and when possible, automate as much of the actual remedial actions.
Automation incident response and remediation is critical for enterprises further along the cybersecurity maturity curve. Ensure that there is strong human monitoring, rule-making, and exception handling when automating critical processes in cybersecurity. Furthermore, automation should not be the primary technique used for incident response.
Automation is not a project that can be set and forget. Things change as rapidly as automation is implemented. The management of all automation projects once they have been implemented is more critical than the installation of automation initiatives.
Automation in SecOps
Automation’s purpose in cybersecurity operations is to relieve cybersecurity organizations’ workload by automating repetitive behaviors.
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 the groundbreaking Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) technology, gives Security Operation Centers (SOCs) a significant boost in SecOps, resulting in a 10x increase in SOC productivity and over 80 percent improved incident response time.
SOAR is a sort of technology that enables businesses to turn their security operational processes into a workflow and orchestrate various existing technologies to better identify, track, and mitigate cyber incidents. Analysts have a plethora of tasks and processes to do, and automation allows them to choose which repetitive operations they want to automate and which they want to operate and process manually.
The Road Ahead
Regardless of the negativities of security automation, one thing is certain that it is here to stay. Even more so now that hackers are beginning to bolster their cyber attacks 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.